Benediction

January 17, 2020

DEBUT In a fictionalization of his distant cousin's life, Dufault tells the tale of Ernest Dufault, a teenage French-Canadian who leaves his family behind to become a cowboy in the American West. Ernest works his way from a cook's flunky to a cowpuncher, gets caught in a cattle-rustling scheme, is incarcerated for a year, then reinvents himself as Will James, an orphan raised by a part-Canadian fur trapper. Will, a talented artist, draws scenes inspired by his surroundings to calm his mind and buy him some liberties. Eventually, he finds work breaking horses, then suffers a serious injury which lands him in California for recovery, and thus begins the next chapter of his life as an artist and author. To craft this historical portrait--Ernest was widely known to embellish details and lie outright--Dufault consulted letters, court documents, and other primary resources to piece together the truth about his relative's life. VERDICT As a Western, there are a few notable missteps here: errors about horse coat coloring, a much-too-long description of cooking gnocchi, and not enough time devoted to actual cow punching or horse breaking. This is best for readers interested in a visceral take on a cowboy reinventing himself.--Brooke Bolton, Boonville-Warrick Cty. P.L., IN

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 30, 2020
Dufault’s unremarkable debut explores the life of early-20th-century Canadian artist and cowboy Will James, born Ernest Dufault, a relative of the author. Dufault begins with Will as a teenage immigrant in the U.S., who has joined up with cowboys near the Great Basin in 1911, pretending to enjoy the taste of prairie oysters to fit in. Three years later, Will runs into fellow itinerant cowboy Lew Hackberry, who persuades him to steal some branded cattle they find loose on the prairie. Will and Lew separate, and after Will is caught by a sheriff, he cooperates in exchange for a promise of leniency, yet spends two years in a Nevada prison. There, he cultivates his talent for drawing and is sustained by letters and postcards from family. And after his release, he has a series of adventures in and around Carson City. Dufault’s meandering portrait is hindered by cloying prose (“They’d felt his generosity, knew it to be intact and precious, something the prison staff had lost years ago. Will James was one of a kind”), though an afterword from Strauss evokes the “deceptively polished” charm of James’s original writings, which landed him the 1927 Newbery Medal. Still, Dufault’s middling effort fails to show why James merited a novel.