Jiles has written a slow, deliberate, and beautifully written character study here.
But ultimately they come to be each other's family, grandfather and granddaughter, on the long road, offering respect, protection, and concern for each other. Johanna is fierce in the stoicism learned from her Native family. As they travel towards the white family she doesn't remember, Johanna and "Kep-dun" come to a fragile trust in each other. She doesn't remember life before joining her Kiowa family and she desperately wants to be returned to them. The young girl, Johanna, doesn't speak English and has forgotten German. When he encounters a good man he knows in one of the towns, he agrees to take on returning a ten year old girl, a captive of the Kiowa for four years, to her aunt and uncle many miles away. Now retired from both professions, he's an itinerant news reader traveling through small towns reading articles and bringing news of the outside world to remote places in Texas.
All of it is out-sized and iconic But how many of those images grew out of Hollywood movies or TV rather than out of a truth that might be less palatable or slower or not as outrageous? Paulette Jiles' newest novel, News of the World, finds a dreamier, more personal story set in a lawless West that does have a passing resemblance to the one depicted on screens and page but which is also more tempered and truthful feeling.Ĭaptain Jefferson Kidd is a widower whose daughters are grown and gone. We all have images in our heads of the Wild West, gunslingers, and cowboys.
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