If you're looking for something along the lines of The True History of the Kelly Gang or even Lonesome Dove, this ain't that. There were bits in this mishmash that worked, but the overall effect was too disjointed and maybe even self-indulgent to make for a satisfying read. Then again, it's Ondaatje, and Annie Dillard and Larry McMurtry blurbed it, so maybe I failed the author rather than the other way around.

A book of grit, a galloping cognizance, and lots and lots of bloody surrealism. It has lots of style - there's a moment where the sun essentially grows hands and performs needed surgery on an outlaw using his own foreskin, and another moment of perfect and tragic serenity where Billy waxes poetic about the joys of not being killed in a barn as he sleeps among the animals - but it's not just style; Ondaatje is amazing at pulling back the scope to give these little flashback character vignettes that endear you to, say, a teetotal sheriff teaching himself to drink. I had a sublime and incredible time going through this book once, but there's ultimately an aloof and unsubstantial smokiness to maybe a lagging third of the book that I'm not dying to go back a second time. I feel bad about that.

Disgusting, violent, and utterly morally bankrupt, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid revisits the airbrushed Wild West, glittering in its wide-brimmed, spray-tan, cocky gunslinger glory, and shreds it to pieces. Ondaatje resists the urge to sentimentalize the figure of Billy the Kid, portraying the outlaw as a brutal, frightening killer with an internal logic portrayed by the Kid as sensible, clear to the reader to be instead the hollow bones of a bunk philosophical theory, one rife with internal contradictions and misanthropic zeal. Great work. If you're going to read it, read it with someone else so you can puzzle over the poetic language together.

4/5 stars