Diezmo

John Clayton cites a couple of unfavorable and one favorable review of Rick Bass's new novel, Diezmo. I just finished the book this morning, and I can say, without equivocation, that I agree with all three reviews.

The book doesn't read much like a novel at all. The fictional narrator is annoyingly inert, and even larger-than-life characters like Bigfoot Wallace seem diminished. Bass seems to have been torn between making things up and sticking to the facts, and wound up writing a book that reads more like an extended essay than a work of fiction.

But what an essay. The book chronicles the Mier Expedition, a chapter of Texas history with inextinguishable appeal for natives of the state. It was a sordid affair, a violent episode of border looting and murder during the days of the Texas Republic, but it draws me for several reasons:

1. I read a biography of Bigfoot Wallace when I was a kid, and it has stuck with me forever.

2. The infamous black bean episode, in which Mexican soldiers decided which 10 percent (hence the novel's title) of Texan prisoners to execute by having them draw beans from a bag containing 10 white beans for each black one. Those who drew black beans were immediately shot. One legend is that Bigfoot Wallace drew a white bean, then gave it away as a gesture of kindness and drew another. Bass doesn't repeat that story, but does say that Wallace lingered over the bag, feeling among the beans for the smallest one, which he believed would be white. It was instead a mottled color, and his captors had to rule it white to spare his life.

3. My father preached for seven years at La Grange, Texas, which is best known to most people as the home of the house of ill repute immortalized in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. But it also is near Monument Hill, a sheer bluff rising out of the Central Texas prairie where the men of the expedition were buried overlooking the Colorado River. We spent many lazy Sunday afternoons on that bluff, playing and gazing on the burial vault in which those men lie.

I was pretty darned excited when I learned that Bass had written about the expedition, and while I can't praise it highly as a novel, I found it very, very hard to put down.