Book Review: Aaron Latham's Riding with John Wayne

Riding with John Wayne
By Aaron Latham
Simon & Schuster, 373 pages, illus., $26.00
ISBN 0743269799

The John Wayne Estate may want to take steps to distance its patron from this novel. Unlike The Duke and his legacy, there is nothing particularly heroic, brave, steadfast or noble about this work of new fiction or its protagonist. Author Aaron Latham uses John Wayne's name in vain.

Latham's hero is named Chick Goodnight, a cowboy writer who purports to live by an ethical and moral Code of the West. However, not a shred of this professed Code is evident in Goodnight's thoughts or deeds. He claims to be uncomfortable with swearing, yet he has nothing more creative in his holster than the f-word. He believes he is a defender of the virtue of women, but he spends all his energy trying to satisfy his libidinous desire for a female film director, while ignoring the peril of others.

He says he values human life, however he takes no action against the vile man suspected of killing his cousin and other vulnerable wannabe actresses just like her. In fact, he does nothing to thwart the despicable villain until the depraved lout tries to kill a horse. Even then, our hero does nothing more than opportunistically tattle on him.

Latham is the author of Urban Cowboy and his new book is apparently inspired by many of the experiences from the production of the popular movie based on that earlier work. A character named Tom Bondini resembles John Travolta, the leading man in Urban Cowboy, and is repeatedly described as "the biggest star in the world" who is also a pilot. The whacked-out leading lady named Sarah Marks (Debra Winger?) employs disruptive and misguided Method acting techniques.

The plot of Riding With John Wayne is supposed to be a murder mystery wrapped around an inside peek at filming a western themed movie. It is not much of a who-dunnit and the insights on filmmaking are sophomoric. Loose threads are left dangling as Latham, who happens to be the husband of 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, kicks into a hurry-up mode to conclude the book in a flurry of final rushed pages. He introduces a new character just three pages from the end. The feeling is that the novelist is as anxious to get this story over with as the reader is.

Latham's writing is too often ham fisted. On multiple occasions in his novel he has his characters use their fingers to make air quotes when they talk to underscore their already stiff irony. Latham's idea of creating character is to have his hero relieve stress by surreptitiously twirling batons like a cheerleader. Upon accidentally discovering this activity, another character comments, "You're a man of many parts." Sentences often fall like luggage down the stairs.

Especially this clunker early in the book about a person who virtually disappears from the story immediately thereafter: "I hug my emotional mother, Annie, who taught school in and around [the town of] Spur for almost fifty years, starting out at the age of seventeen in a one-room schoolhouse, ending at age sixty-five in a mud-colored brick building that looked like a big trailer house without wheels."

It must be said that one of the stranger aspects of filmmaking is captured effectively by Latham in a well-crafted brief phrase. He conveys the extreme tedium that frequently underlies the production of such a magical commodity as a movie when his protagonist refers to returning to another day's labor as going "back to work in the dream salt mine."

At least John Wayne extracted some star dust from that dream salt mine.