Glendon Swarthout (1918–1992)

Like many avid readers, I maintain a fairly long “wish list” of books, and occasionally when I lay hands on one of them, I have forgotten why I wanted to read it in the first place. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised by the oddball and obscure titles; at other times, my response is “what on earth was I thinking?”

Glendon Swarthout’s Cadillac Cowboys is one of the latter.

Basically, it’s a fish-out-of-water tale about a Connecticut college professor who, having overdosed on writings about the American west, uproots his wife and two daughters and moves the family to Arizona in the mid-1960s. But Swarthout’s writing style is so self-consciously cutesy, his main character so condescending, and his portrayal of his new neighbors so mean-spirited, that there’s not much here to enjoy.

As a brief sample: the Cadell family buys "a pseudo-adobe-mock-tile-roofed-baroque-hacienda -- sort of" on Sarcophagus Mountain “at about coph height”. Most of his neighbors in the then-booming Scottsdale area are wealthy transplanted Easterners like himself, who have brought their pre-conceptions, biases, and lifestyle with them, and most of the native Arizonans, regardless of race, are portrayed as ignorant, brutal, drunken, larcenous, or a combination of all four.

Several reviews (including, probably, one that led me to think I wanted to read this) refer to it with phrases like “scathingly funny satire”. Sorry, none of the above.

Don’t waste your time with this.… (meer)