One archetypal good guy in Western literature is Shane, and now Shane has finally come back (in "Fencing the Sky'') as former SDS radical Mike Arans, a passionate and idealistic outlander who, naturally enough, becomes a loner cowboy after dropping out of Swarthmore at the height of the antiwar movement.
And all melodrama is about good guys and bad guys. The landscape of Western literature doesn't change, only the good guys and the bad guys. It wasn't all that long ago that the bad guys in our stories were the guys who built fences and shot sheepherders. Something funny happened on the way to the ranch, and we have forgotten that the now-romanticized ranchers and cowboys who settled this country were, in many ways, no less exploitive and ambitious than the developers who have now replaced railroad barons as the bad guys in regional fiction. Its moments of lyric, natural beauty - and there are many - are occasionally obscured by old-fashioned doctrinaire preachiness, like the ageless mountains behind Denver's brown cloud. But the book itself, intentionally or not, is a unique artifact of Western consciousness and environment. The plot is a time-worn Western motif: greed vs. 24 - If Wyoming poet James Galvin's "Fencing the Sky'' were the last Western novel ever written, the genre would have come full circle: a melodrama in which violence is righteous if committed in the name of protecting the good folks who scratch out a meager existence in an unconquerable landscape.
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