All Intensive Purposes

In The Contract Surgeon, South Dakotan Dan O'Brien tells the story of Crazy Horse's last day of life from the perspective of the Army doctor who treated him after he was bayonetted at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1877. O'Brien's narrator, Dr. Valentine McGillicuddy, was a historical figure who finished his career as the house surgeon at the Claremont resort on the Oakland-Berkeley line in the 1930s, and O'Brien explains at the outset that he has used historical research as much as possible. Indeed, a timeline at the start of the book helps to bring the reader up to speed on the campaigns before and after Little Big Horn, where Crazy Horse's forces killed Custer and the soldiers under him. Most of this book's action takes place after Crazy Horse's surrender, when various Indians were living on or near Fort Robinson and its garrison.

O'Brien deftly tells McGillicuddy's tale by weaving scenes from his life before and after 1877 with the story of what happened on that day. With a few minor quibbles -- e.g., I don't think someone seeing warships in San Francisco Bay in the late 1930s would be looking ahead to World War II -- I generally was impressed with the way that O'Brien recreated the times and places, and the way he used McGillicuddy as a guide.

But I have a big beef -- warning: spoilers follow, for there's no way to say this without giving away much of what happens -- with the racial politics of The Contract Surgeon. In other respects -- technological, sexual -- McGillicuddy is a creature of his times. But in depicting his views of Indians, and of Crazy Horse in particular, O'Brien has given his narrator from the late 1800s and early 1900s a sensibility that seems, to this reader, to be unmistakably from the late 20th century. McGillicuddy has nary a critical word to say about the Indians, and Crazy Horse is depicted as something like a saint, the very model of a noble savage. This would be easier to swallow if McGillicuddy came to these views late in life -- for example, as O'Brien suggests that he has grown to appreciate his wife in ways that he could not as a younger man, owing perhaps to the cultural mileau or his specific upbringing -- but while McGillicuddy's persona grows in other ways, his appreciation of things Indian appears first in full blossom, in a romantic fantasy of an innocent High Plains encounter with an Indian -- naked, no less -- whom we later learn is none other than Crazy Horse himself. I mean, please. O'Brien could have let McGillicuddy and Crazy Horse get acquainted at Fort Robinson, so the earlier encounter between them is just a little much -- the false note that reveals something off about the whole project, I'm afraid.

The business of depicting a world 125 years in the past is difficult enough, but all the more so if the story you want to tell about it is inescapably modern.

(I'm still sorting out my reactions to this book, and may yet revise the above.)