"Rick Harsch told me that for The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, he reached into a bag of tricks left in a closet in Brussels by forgotten literary masters, and as the punning title might suggest, he attempts no less—and much more—than to come to grips with what empire has wrought, and how over the recent two centuries the United States rose to global economic mastery and nuclear proliferate madhouse. A serious tome indeed, with serious purpose, to the delight of the reader Harsch recognizes that seldom do tricks accomplish their purpose without humor—thus he is able to render the story of Hugh Glass and the grizzly (his manuscript preceded the DiCaprio film) with dark humor and quotidian accuracy yielding what meaning of that story was absent from the film even as the location has been moved 1500 miles westward. Yet Harsch plays no tricks with time: his modern characters are modern and his historical rendering of their ancestors slot into their proper niches in historical time, vividly lit within historically corrective tales running from the days of the mountain man right up to those of nuclear testing, down the Oregon Trail, with the gold rush, into the nuclear age, Vietnam, and even Blackwater—or, in this novel, Blackguard, the CEO of which is Mandrake Winchester Fondling, father of Drake Fondling the second, friend of Donnie Garvin, the two of whom dash off to Brussels much in the manner of Bardamu joining WWI at the beginning of Celine’s masterpiece. Heedless of the history hurrying their fates, they befriend the artist/bartender Setif, whose role in the story may be no more than to suggest what Harsch calls ‘an adamantine luminescence of the sane and the good buried beneath the degradations of time and the humans who keep track of it’. Their return to the United States is as if the fording of a stream across stones of history: Fallujah, Twin Towers, Assassinations, and the familial dysphagia that bedevils the themes of US literature. My favorite of Harsch’s tricks are the Rabelaisian lists, for this novel may be above all a gift from one lover of language to all literary lovers of language, and the shock upon realizing the meaning of the lists—where the surreal, the hypermodern, and the mundane finally meet in an equation of horror—is jarring enough to elicit guilt in the most innocent reader. Meanwhile, this book is a romp, a romp through history and the present, story after story told in the jargon of the mountain man of the old west, the Indians, the coal miners, the Joycean—at times, at others the clochard—narrator, the anonymous songsters of the old west, the tycoons of past and present, and one madman montagnard, the mysterious midget Nordgaard. Throughout, all registers are reached, the reader finding where known legends are unknowable, where the wild Joaquin Murriata and the first Nevada lawman—shot six times only to survive—intersect, and what veins of story lead us to the present, where the logic and illogic of rapine dust off the irradiated dust to find that the inevitably violent and absurd have remained as complicit and inseparable as horse and rider, rider and horse."

• Klaus Hauser, Stuttgart, for River Boat Books. An excerpt from the novel: “This hell began with vast stretches of woodlands host to vermin of all manner, including preternaturally giant hirsutes suchlike as bears and wolves, and small aerial pests including bees, biting flies, mosquitoes, and flying stinging ants. The psychological hell would set upon him in the form of large docile creatures such as elk, deer, goats, and even fish that would all appear close and real and transmogrify into phantasms that vanish before the feckless hunting forays of a starving man. There would be berries aplenty and they would taste fresh and they would burst with elixir upon bite, juice dampening Hector’s beard—but after a week they would come to resemble tree bark at first tongue touch, fierce with the redolence of possum piss. There would be possum piss but not sighting of possum and certain digitigrade carnivores as the ferocious sagonku (such a delicacy as would never be known back east and as far as Europe if you knew just how they roast) that would be difficult enough to elude when they drygulched you as they tended, the more so when the victim be a limper, and worst of all they et what they tore off of flesh and left with a sarcophery of stink spray that etched into the skin and remained to remind of the assault for weeks, all of which is to say that in beaver rich riverine forest why would not a man unfamiliar with said beaver find them to be the most nervewrasslin of all, the monstrous teeth, what they did to trees, the construction evidence of a great intelligence, especially once an Injun or two convinced ya that maybe Injuns are smarter than ye, in which case, and considering the implacable fleshungry sagonku, what did beavers eat and were them not bones crossed at the apex of them midstream huts where they could hide an entire search party. And of course there might or might not be Injuns, hostile scalpers, mocking forest dwellers that might or might not follow Hector just out of his sight, and though they not be cannibals, would be strangely detached, a superior species that lounged like apes in Indian jungles, spearing antelope at will, effortlessly, and they would wait for Hector to perish before they took his self-carved spear for a trophy to be displayed in their museum of the follies of white men. Probably they would display Hector’s bones there after their pet vultures picked him clean; first, though, they would cut a strip of flesh from his buttocks and toss it to one of their wolves and the wolf would sniff it and look around at their eyes to let them know he got the joke and he, too, would laugh, and a vulture would lope over and retrieve the meat. Children would play at Hector builds a fire and laughter would rumble like a long heckling earthquake throughout the lands of the fur trade.”