Review: ‘The Kid’

'The Kid,” the new novel by Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Ron Hansen, recounts the brief life of the outlaw commonly known as Billy the Kid. Hansen adopts the rhythms of a biography to tell his tale, avoiding or gently mocking the conventions of Westerns.

The result is a story of shifting loyalties, hard scrabble living and a patchwork approach to justice. Billy, neither an innocent nor the bloodthirsty killer of legend, deals with each difficulty as it comes and is often sorry for the necessity of his solution.

Though Hansen's Billy is sometimes kidded for quoting from dime novels - explicitly separating 'The Kid” from the genre tropes - the narrative voice is stylized. The frontier and its capacity for mythmaking are present in the prose.

'Who knows why, but the Kid took ownership of Tunstall's favorite dapple-gray buggy team and was found out and locked up in the same hoosegow he'd released Evans and his misfits from. But no one came for him, which contaminated his trust in their camaraderie.”

Phrases like 'contaminated his trust in their camaraderie” give the unnamed narrator - who is apparently telling the tale many years after the events in question - a personality. That personality balances out the names, dates and incidents that could easily overwhelm even an attentive reader.

The book's dialogue serves the same purpose. Hansen's narrator lets us eavesdrop on The Kid's various encounters, and Hansen deftly handles the conceit as if it were a matter of course that a biographer could offer up the details of private conversation.

Riding along with 'The Kid” is an adventure worth saddling up for.