The Last Cowboy is the second novel from Saskatchewan-born, Toronto-based author Lee Gowan. It has been called “romantic and harrowing” and a “modern Western.” Of course, those were the words of a publicist, and we all know that flacks tend to bend the truth a bit.
In order of most grievous puffery, let’s begin with “harrowing”. The Last Cowboy is not particularly so. There’s some adultery, some inter-generational strife. A couple of the main characters own handguns. But mostly none of this is very distressing. The story spends most of its time belly-aching and describing the Saskatchewan landscape, the latter being rather more palatable than the former.
“Romantic” can be a bit more difficult, since it’s attempted as often as it fails, but truly there isn’t even the ghost of an attempt here. The main character, Sam McMahon, is getting divorced. All the other folks in the book are pretty much celibate, except for the mostly undescribed soon-to-be-ex Mrs. McMahon, who just happens to be conducting an (also undescribed) affair with Sam’s older brother Vern. Suffice it to say, that’s about as romantic as a hard-boiled egg.
A “modern Western” is bit of an enigma, the genre of Westerns being for the most part about lawless men living by their own rules and taming rugged nature, themes that wouldn’t seem to modernize too well. Not that it couldn’t happen-it just isn’t happening in this novel. With a bit of a stretch we could say that the book is (re-)examining the whole ‘idea’ of the Western, but then again, one might just as easily say otherwise.
The bottom line is, The Last Cowboy is a dreadful bore. The major characters are hardly compelling. Sam’s too whiny, for one thing. Ai Lee, the Torontonian that gets messed up in Sam’s life, has an irritating predisposition to psychoanalyze herself-you’ll learn not just what she’s thinking, but how and why she’s thinking it, ad nauseum. Sam’s grandfather-ostensibly a ‘real’ cowboy-is grating in his nostalgic recollection of the West’s former grandeur, even more so in his internal monologues about why the ‘old ways’ were better.
The other characters remain bits of cardboard cut-out that help move the story along, if that. The single most compelling character, Vern (the wife-stealing older brother), is a parody of what you might imagine a modern cowboy to be-he raises cattle, wears the boots and hat, drinks heavily, womanizes, and can fix cars-but his promise is squandered in the story’s margins.
In much of his earlier work-Going to Cuba (1990, short stories), Make Believe Love (2001, novel)- Gowan had a knack for setting up characters with a contemporary feel and situations in pretty Prairie landscapes, but no amount of blue skies and fields of gold can save The Last Cowboy.
