I will go against the critical consensus and assert that Cash most assuredly IS a genius. Admittedly his work so far is extremely derivative of Cormac McCarthy, but was McCarthy himself not slavishly derivative of Faulkner until the publication of his fifth novel, Blood Meridian? Both men wear their canonical influences honestly and unashamedly, and this does not preclude genius because all books are made out of other books. Even Wildcat, Cash's lambasted debut, will undoubtedly be reappraised m

I will go against the critical consensus and assert that Cash most assuredly IS a genius. Admittedly his work so far is extremely derivative of Cormac McCarthy, but was McCarthy himself not slavishly derivative of Faulkner until the publication of his fifth novel, Blood Meridian? Both men wear their canonical influences honestly and unashamedly, and this does not preclude genius because all books are made out of other books. Even Wildcat, Cash's lambasted debut, will undoubtedly be reappraised more favorably in coming years. His obsolete vernacular is so elegantly retrograde as to paradoxically be far ahead of its time. And one cannot deny the extraordinary resemblance, bordering on plagiarism, between Wildcat and Paul Thomas Anderson's script for There Will Be Blood, released a decade after Wildcat to universal acclaim.



As for Old Custer specifically, Cash's obsolete vernacular has been honed and refined. The baroque sesquipedalianisms of Wildcat have been replaced by a stark, minimalist diction reminiscent of Hemingway at his best. His prose is muscular, almost martial, as if to echo the feigned valiance of his protagonist, the cowardly centenarian George Armstrong Custer, who faked his own death in order to escape court martial before living for 65 more years as a hedonistic pimp in a Buenos Aires whorehouse and then finally being struck by an errant shell from a Nazi U-Boat raiding British shipping in the Rio de la Plata. Cash's inversion of the jingoistic martyrdom of Custer has more macroscopic ramifications, namely a deconstruction of the entire false mythology of the American West. Old Custer is a triumph of canonical proportions.