Sun Going Down by Jack Todd A Touchstone Book (Simon & Schuster), 2008

Jack Todd’s new book, a multi-generational novel about the Paint family’s involvement with the landscape and events of the American West from the Civil War to the Great Depression, could have been four times as long as its 363 pages, given the epic sweep of its subject matter. Unfortunately, it feels that long anyway, and the reader who manages to brave his way through to the end displays as much courage and fortitude as those early pioneers and settlers who tamed the West. Ebenezer Paint and his descendants are not the first of those pioneers, but they are hands-down the most boring.

The book is frenetically populated with colorful characters, and there is bound to be a little something for every potential reader (for instance, there’s a group of five sisters who’re something of a hoot, constantly out-doing the men around them in every way – they’ll certainly be the best part of the movie this book is preordained to become). Too little something to prevent eventual and certain starvation, but something. Sun Going Down gives every impression of being that one book all authors have, the one they dote over but which nevertheless refuses to cohere. Only somebody past-convinced of the worth of what he’s writing would unload prose like this:

They [Ebenezer and his new wife] fumed and feuded for a week. In the end, they seemed to wind down like spinning tops. Eb said he was married to the most bullheaded woman in the territory; Cora said there was never a man born so contrary or set in his ways. Finally the night came when Cora allowed him under her shift, letting him know that she was weary of their squabbling.

The narrative goes on and on like that (the letters the various characters write to each other are, if you can credit it, even worse), just a-wanderin’ and a-moseyin’ all over the place and even managing to make the Battle of Wounded Knee a bit tedious. The publisher’s ad campaign compares Sun Going Down to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. This was a singularly bad idea.

–Steve Donoghue