Little Big Man

How odd.

I read this in my early 20s, after the film starring Dustin Hoffman came out, and was enthralled. I remember loving every page. But now, on a second reading fifty years later, I was startled to find my attention flagging. What had seemed so vivid and engaging when I was young was now just a little too loquacious. Some passages – the Washita River massacre and the Battle of the Little Big Horn, go on and on for pages, with none of the shock and power of the same moments in the film.

And speaking of the film, I was surprised to find that several characters and events aren’t even in the book. Which is fine; the credits state that the film is based on the book. What surprises me is that those characters are often so much more vivid and memorable than what you find on the page.

This is hard. I’m knocking a classic. And it is a classic. It’s view of the American West might seem old hat now that we’ve all seen Dances With Wolves and embraced a new understanding of US history. But it was written in 1964, when the whole Cowboys and Indians myth was still going strong. What it must have been like to read it then.

Perhaps that’s the fate of classics. They’re superseded and come to seem old and dusty. They pave the way for something new, then get pushed aside.

But Little Big Man is still in print, 59 years after it first appeared.