Unpublished until now, Strange Cowboy was the first novel ever written by Sam Michel, author of 2007’s Big Dogs and Flyboys and, over twenty years ago, the seminal short story collection Under the Light. Michel is married to another innovative author, Noy Holland, and like her, he was taught and initially edited by Gordon Lish. As with many students of Lish, the influence of Michel’s mentor looms large over his prose: every sentence in Strange Cowboy seems to summon up a new world, tied inside a taut knot of surging, swerving syntax. But beneath Lish’s stylistic stamp on this book, one can also discern other voices, more European in origin: Proust’s temporal consciousness; the humanist pathos of Joyce; certainly the obsessive discursiveness of Beckett and Bernhard. And Strange Cowboy’s story transposes all this into what could be called the true topos of modernism — after all, artistic truths are allowed to be counterintuitive — the American West.
