Desperado

AS EARLY novels go, “The Ballad of Dingus Magee” (Counterpoint: 156 pp., $13.95 paper) stands like a dusty road marker, pointing off into the wide distance of the path not taken. You may know David Markson for his handful of beguiling, postmodern head-spinners such as “This Is Not a Novel” and “Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” but early on, he tried his hand at “entertainments”: two crime novels and this 1966 satire, which pokes as many holes in the grand myth of the western outlaw as it possibly can.

Dingus Magee, at 19, has a price on his head of $9,500 -- all the better for C.L. Hoke Birdsill, the sheriff of Yerkey’s Hole (a one-and-a-half-horse town), who wants to apprehend him. Hoke has not only his reputation to uphold but also the chance to win back the favor, and the bed, of local madam Belle Nops. Of course, the only trouble is that Dingus isn’t just going to give himself up -- no, sir. What follows are plenty of deliciously worded passages and bawdy misadventures that involve Dingus shooting from the hip metaphorically as well as literally. Indeed, his mythmaking is done not so much by his pistol as by something equally close to his belt-line.

Early bits of Markson’s elliptical style reverberate throughout. Much of the action takes place offstage, and the story twists and turns in an order that is anything but chronological. We see differing portraits of Dingus Magee through the confusion of other characters, while Markson paints a picture of western heroes who themselves are just victims of overexcitement and general misunderstanding. “Looks like if a feller gets a mite of a reputation,” Dingus sighs, “they’ll hold him in account fer everything, if’n he’s attending to his own business somewheres else.”

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-- George Ducker