A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

This spring, I became involved in a fence dispute with a neighbor. Vegetation was cut, surveyors were called, lumber shortages were cursed, Robert Frost was invoked, and a barrier was erected. Gazing out my window now at the pressure-treated pine, I have decided to transmute any lingering resentment into literary channels, and thus my year in reading focuses on fences literal and metaphorical, wonderful books in which boundaries (generic, moral, disciplinary) are crossed. Should one reasonably argue that this conceit seems forced, I would counter that this is my coping mechanism and I’ll shoehorn these works into Contemporary Themed Reviews in any way I see fit.

In the beginning was the curse word: “Fucking’s the crux…Fucking’s the beginning. Fucking’s the end.” ’s florid Western opens with two fence-hopping misalliances: Ginny has been sleeping with her rancher neighbor; her mare has been impregnated by her neighbor’s gigantic stud, a “villainous Percheron,” and follows her stillborn foal to the grave. As her sister looks on—and indeed instigates—the adulterous Ginny is brutally assaulted and left for dead by her husband, (“a good man in a bad mood”), her brother-in-law, and the “rodeo kid.” She survives, though, to escape, and her assailants commence a long, grinding chase; one member of the posse sounds like