The go-to Great Modernist Western Novels are Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, with Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man and Oakley Hall’s Warlock galloping alongside them. But I’d also add James Carlos Blake’s wonderfully drenched In the Rogue Blood, Elmore Leonard’s typically sere Last Stand at Saber River, and, now, Philipp Meyer’s no-sprawl epic The Son, a book at once aware of the anti-romantic tradition set in place by those earlier novels, and confident enough to fracture it.
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