No Country for Young Widows

(NYTimes) Robert Olmstead’s seventh novel is set in the reddening dusk of 1870s Indian Territory, where lives were often unmoored by any strictures of civilization, but the “Savage Country” of its title might equally refer to the human heart at large, with its alternating impulses of ambition and cruelty, humanity and inhumanity.
The plot is simple enough. A woman, Elizabeth, loses her debt-ridden husband to an errant horse hoof. His black-sheep brother, Michael — haunted by an unnamed tragedy we infer is romantic in nature — leaves a big-game hunting gig in Africa to help clear his brother’s accounts out West. The only way is to kill buffalo, and lots of them. Continued