My own mother wouldn’t have liked the book as much as Ron Charles. You can read  his review for the Washington Post in its glorious entirety, but here are the parts I might have tattooed on my arm:

Washington Post

Ron Charles reviews ‘Doc’ by Mary Doria Russell
By Ron Charles, Tuesday, May , 9:08 PM

If I had a six-shooter (and didn’t work in the District), I’d be firing it off in celebration of “Doc,” Mary Doria Russell’s fantastic new novel about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. Since winning top honors for her science fiction 15 years ago, Russell has blasted her way into one genre after another, and now she’s picked up the old conventions of the Wild West and brought these dusty myths back to life in a deeply sympathetic, aggressively researched and wonderfully entertaining story.

“Doc” is … a bold act of historical reclamation that scrapes off the bull and allows these American legends to walk and talk and love and grieve in the dynamic 19th-century world that existed before Hollywood shellacked it into cliches… Russell can evoke plenty of grandeur and hell-raising without squaring every lawman’s jaw and waxing every villain’s mustache to a deadly point…

“He began to die when he was 21,” Russell writes at the opening, “but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle.” The whole novel takes place in the shadow of that death sentence… Born in Georgia in 1851 with a cleft palate, Holliday had already beaten the odds just by surviving infancy, but his wealthy mother was determined that her son would speak like a gentleman and receive the classical education his fierce intellect deserved. He grew up on Virgil and Homer, and from the beginning Russell casts his tragic live not in terms of Old West myths, but of those far older heroes who were his boyhood models… How this smart, talented young man constructed his life under these deadly conditions is the true subject of Russell’s affecting novel… You can’t help but feel your throat clench in sympathy as he strains for breath…

“Doc” focuses on Dodge City, Kan., in 1878. Russell captures this wildest of Wild West towns in all its mud-stained virility… This is a town caught in the swift confluence of national changes. Brawling saloons and accommodating whorehouses are locked in a death match with new forces of respectability and temperance, all greased with astronomical sums of money. “[Dodge City] had a single purpose,” Russell writes, “to extract wealth from Texas. Drovers brought cattle north and got paid in cash. Dodge sent them home in possession of neither.”

…Russell moves gracefully along two intertwined story lines. One involves Holliday, “snake-slender and casual in fresh-pressed linen the color of cream,” who comes to Dodge for the climate and hopes to set up a new dental practice. His extraordinary companion is Kate Harony, a formidable Hungarian prostitute with a classical education… Their tumultuous relationships, a mixture of scheming, love and intellectual repartee, serves as the emotional heart of the novel…. Woven through that sad, romantic tale is the story of Doc’s friend, a young lawman named Wyatt Earp, who … takes a job as a deputy marshal only after getting the mayor to agree to his terms… “There’s got to be one law for everybody, or I can’t do this job.” In a town that runs on … corruption, that will prove to be a dangerous principle.

What’s so beautiful about this novel is the way Russell dismantles rickety legends while reconstructing her own larger-than-life characters on a firmer foundation of historical fact and psychological insight… plumbing the real heroism of these men and enjoying their capacity for tenderness

“Doc” remains daringly free of quick draws or showdowns. Russell can choreograph a tavern brawl or … card game, but far more of this engaging novel is taken up with the day-to-day struggle to keep the peace, encourage one’s friends, and quiet the shame that haunts Doc and Wyatt, two very different men who respect each other’s implacable discipline. While exploring the fluid state of post-Civil War race relations, the seesawing economic conditions of the United States, and the precarious fortunes of sex workers, she keeps the story moving almost entirely by the force of her sensitive characterizations.

I am in awe of how confidently Russell rides through this familiar territory, takes control and remakes all its rich heroism and tragedy…. Given her propensity to strike out into radically different subjects, I suspect she’ll mosey on to someplace entirely different next time. But how I wish she’d settle her for a spell and give us a sequel.


Ron Charles, The Post’s fiction editor, reviews books every Wednesday.