A book my father left behind

Books by Zane Grey were on the bookshelf when I was growing up, sharing space with the hardcover Bible study books and a few other religious books and fiction. My father was a fan of Zane Grey; they were his books. I remember seeing the hardcover books in his hand as he dissolved himself in the novel and, being interrupted, turned down the corner of a page to keep his place.

When my nephew, who now lives in the house where I grew up, offered one of those books to me, I accepted the gift as a small treasure from my past. This one, "The Man of the Forest," had my father's name and "Dec. '42" on the inside cover. It was my mother's handwriting, marking a date 75 months before my birth.

I had never read a word of Zane Grey, but I knew the name and was familiar with the Old West genre. Some years ago, I read magazines with full-page ads offering collections of Zane Grey novels. The name always intrigued me, the two simple syllables and the unusual first name made more rare by its starting letter. But if I expected something magical from Zane Grey, the novel that my father had read, perhaps many times, did not deliver.

Biographies say Grey's fiction portrayed an idealized version of the Old West. "The Man of the Forest" certainly follows that path. I had expected a more engaging, suspenseful writing style from an author known for "adventure" stories. I found instead an author who tends to wander off on some explanation of a character's personality or habits. Instead of following the advice of writing teachers to "show me, don't tell me," Grey repeatedly tells the reader things that would better be "shown" through the plot. Born in 1872, Grey writes like a Victorian with long-winded sentences and attributions saddled with adverbs, such as "resolutely," "firmly," "engagingly," and so on — wasted words derided as "Tom Swiftlies," to indicate they belong in second-rate juvenile fiction.

"The Man of the Forest" might not be the best example of Grey's writing, but I'm not tempted to sample others. Although his fiction inspired dozens of movies and television shows and his name is synonymous with Old West fiction, I found that the novel my father had cherished and kept for more than 60 years put me to sleep after half a page. It took me weeks to get through it, and I stuck with it not out of interest in Zane Grey but in dedication to my father, in wanting to share something with him. Now I've read a book he owned. I suspect he read far better books. I know I have.