Austin writer Bill Wittliff’s engaging new novel, The Devil’s Backbone, has been hailed by several reviewers as a new American “quest novel” in the vein of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Indeed, the two books share some similarities. In each, for example, a youngster leaves home to escape a drunken, restrictive father and has a variety of encounters with odd and sometimes threatening characters.
Yet never the twain shall meet when the two stories’ tones are compared. While Huckleberry Finn offers some tense situations along the Mississippi River in the 1840s, it can seem mostly lighthearted when weighed against the dangers that permeate The Devil’s Backbone, set in Texas and Mexico in the 1880s.
Yes, Huck Finn’s mother is dead, and his town-drunk father wants to control Huck’s life, take his money and spend it all on whiskey. But the lifestyle Huck flees seems somewhat akin to Mayberry when it is weighed against the situations faced by the young boy oddly named Papa in the new Wittliff novel.
Papa’s father, Old Karl, is vicious, a mean-drunk horse trader readily capable of killing people and their prized animals. Papa’s mother, Amanda, is something of a horse whisperer, but Old Karl has shot and killed a young horse she was trying to tame.
After a final, bitter argument, she saddles up and rides away, leaving Papa and his brother, Herman, to endure the grim work and punishments meted out by Old Karl.
For a while, young Papa keeps hoping she will return. Finally, he can take no more, and he leaves to search for his mother.
His journey grows into a coming-of-age story that unfolds in rugged countryside and in small towns. Papa gets into several tough scrapes and encounters characters who are either picaresque or flat-out callous.
The Devil’s Backbone demands close reading; it is not easily skimmed. Its words rise from a child who is poorly educated in grammar, punctuation and spelling (just as Huckleberry Finn was written, Twain said, using “a number of dialects”). One example from Wittliff’s text: “Old Karl’s idea of a wife was somebody to Cook, Wash, and Wait on him, Papa said, but Momma didn’t fit no bill. She carried two pistols, smoked her crooked pipe, and could shoot then skin a Buck Deer fore it ever drawed last breath. But Oh she was tender when it come to Horses, he said.”
With The Devil’s Backbone, Wittliff continues a distinguished storytelling career built around variety: publisher, screenwriter, film producer, film director, TV producer, photographer and novelist.
He was business and production manager of SMU Press in Dallas before starting Encino Press in 1964 in Austin. In the late 1970s, he began finding success as a screenwriter for television and motion pictures. Some of his best-known screenwriting credits include The Black Stallion, Honeysuckle Rose, Red Headed Stranger, Legends of the Fall and The Perfect Storm. He also was executive producer and a screenwriter for Lonesome Dove, the famed TV miniseries based on Larry McMurtry’s novel.
The Devil’s Backbone features several mood-magnifying illustrations by award-winning Dallas artist Jack Unruh. His works have appeared in a long list of publications, ranging from The Atlantic to Rolling Stone and Texas Monthly.
Spoiler alert: The book concludes with a cliffhanger moment and with a notice that here ends “Book One of the Papa Stories.” Indeed, a trilogy is planned.
Si Dunn is an Austin novelist, screenwriter and book reviewer.
books@dallasnews.com
The Devil’s Backbone
Bill Wittliff
(University of Texas, $29.95)
