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Soledad, or Solitudes
"Vliet's prose is a joy and a continual surprise. There is nobody else with his talent for evoking Texas as it was in the 1880's; nobody else who gives us the same sharp feeling for landscape, animals, birds, changing skies, and above all for the people, as they lived out their solitary, violent lives full of kindness, resentments, and hardships accepted without complaint. Vliet's writing is close to being a national treasure.- Malcolm CowleyTexas, in the 1880's. A man, provoked, kills another man. In the dead man's pocket, the picture of a beautiful woman. In the mind of the man who killed him, an obsessive determination to find the woman, and to know her.It is this search, and the eventual confrontation of passion and will, that galvanize this remarkable, and remarkably involving, novel about life in another time, another place...
263 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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About the author
R.G. Vliet
10Ìýbooks3ÌýfollowersRussell G. Vliet (1929-1984) was a playwright, novelist, and poet. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of a naval medical officer. He was educated at Southwest Texas State University and did graduate work at Yale. Vliet three times won the Texas Institute of Letters Award, twice for collections of poems and once for his novel Solitudes. In 1968 he was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Fiction. He was the author of three collections of Poetry: Events and Celebrations (1966), The Man with the Black Mouth (1970), and Water and Stone (1980). Vliet died in May of 1984, in North Adams, Massachusetts, just days after completing his final novel, Scorpio Rising.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 22, 2025
�One of those Texas blizzards that come from the high north or northwest, the back of the hand of God Almighty, and smack the land low. That thin blue streak on the horizon northwest rises up fast, like lifting a window shade onto night. Then the wind slices out from the hefted dark and stings the trees, fetches a screech across the sleet-scratched stones. The air is one long slant of buckshot cold and powdery snow. Thirty minutes ago it might have been a spring country. Now a man sucks ice in his tin cup.�
So it starts, and already I’m there and feeling frozen to the bone. In Soledad, R.G. Vliet has written an extraordinary portrayal of the old Texas frontier that brings the landscape vividly alive. And through this landscape, cursed like Cain, rides the archetypal lonesome cowboy � threading his way between the encroaching towns and railtracks of civilization and the receding and trackless wilderness, between the law and the absence of law � always trying to find himself and make sense of the world. An existentialist cowboy.
The characters are satisfyingly complex, the dialogue sounds right, even the smallest details of weather and rock are convincing. A real pleasure to read by a writer I’ve not come across before.
So it starts, and already I’m there and feeling frozen to the bone. In Soledad, R.G. Vliet has written an extraordinary portrayal of the old Texas frontier that brings the landscape vividly alive. And through this landscape, cursed like Cain, rides the archetypal lonesome cowboy � threading his way between the encroaching towns and railtracks of civilization and the receding and trackless wilderness, between the law and the absence of law � always trying to find himself and make sense of the world. An existentialist cowboy.
The characters are satisfyingly complex, the dialogue sounds right, even the smallest details of weather and rock are convincing. A real pleasure to read by a writer I’ve not come across before.
February 23, 2021
RG Vliet’s Solitudes (aka Soledad) is a Western, but it’s not in the romantic Zane Grey mold, nor in the harsher, yet more elegiac mode of AB Guthrie or Larry McMurtry, but it does have some affinity with the Cormac McCarthy, whose Plains trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, et al) and Blood Meridian highlight existential questions of contingency and meaningfulness in a world girt with only a flimsy social fabric. Vliet steers in the direction of McCarthy, but I would argue that his explorations of the existential recall a very laconic Dostoyevsky, where there is some groping to understand God’s ways.
Chief among Dostoyevsky’s great novels are the colloquies, the great verbal outpourings of his characters� beliefs, sensations, and ruminations, which often are a muddle of inconsistencies and abrupt retractions. Vliet’s characters speak tersely, and there are no long speeches, ever, but there is the same contrariness and failure to pin the talk on what is being felt or understood. But it’s not just this lack of dialectic clarity that correlates with Dostoyevsky, since it can be easily argued that most real-world talk is also just fatuous blather and/or phatic civility. As in Dostoyevsky’s novels, Vliet intimates a religious/spiritual realm, and the two principals in Solitudes speak with an underlying urgency to connect with and understand something larger—whether each other or the world and the way and why of it.
Vliet’s strategy is to alienate the reader from his principal character almost from the outset. In 1881 Texas, somewhere in the range of Austin and San Antonio, four men are rounding up strays (and perhaps collecting a few extras) for their cattle drive. After a harsh ice storm rolls through, the four welcome a well-appointed, stately Mexican to join their breakfast campfire. Something about this “Meskin� rattles 24-year-old Clabe, and he suddenly shoots him dead. The other men don’t make much of this but allow Clabe is tetchy, and they help to bury the body and make plans to sell the fine horse in a distant county.
The distinguished old Mexican had a cardboard picture of a young woman in a white dress that he’d tried to show Clabe and the others, and Clabe decides he’s going to find this woman. The course of the novel is set, and the main character is a racist killer. It takes some work hanging with Clabe, difficult as he is to like or understand.
Before Clabe sets out on his quest, he further alienates the reader by raping and leaving the young woman he’d been wooing. There is some faint echo of comedy in the sexual maneuverings to penetrate her long johns, but his conquest and callous flight rub the wrong way. …Which is immediately contrasted with his winning sweet-talk to the cook from whom he gets a quick breakfast and provisions for his quest. Clabe heads to San Antonio, contracts cholera, and after two days of riding while sick, falls from his horse unconscious. He is nursed by a scrabbling mason/farmer/sheepherder and his wife. During his sickness there are visions of Clabe’s short life: an unrepentant lefty, red-haired, freckled, prone to seizures, beaten by his father till he runs away, aged nine, and settles in with an old couple who cares for him until they die a few years later. After three months of recuperation and working the farmstead (building a fence, fetching the ton of stones to build a chimney, and lovemaking with the unhappy wife), Clabe lights out with a stolen rifle, coffee pot, and a scrub horse.
The subsequent wandering is entertaining, and Vliet’s writing makes compelling Clabe’s solitary activities in the rugged landscape. Clabe eventually reaches the small town in the highlands that the old Mexican had established. He also finds the woman he’d sought, the Mexican’s granddaughter, Soledad, who is now running the nearby estate/hacienda. There is a shift in the narrative, and for a long while Vliet slants the story from Soledad’s perspective, but there is something unspoken in this version of things, just as there is with Clabe’s. Clabe is hired on to garden and tend the fruiting trees. The two begin a wary dance, as Soledad is certain Clabe had something to do with her grandfather’s disappearance. The two are drawn to one another, but there is also disgust and loathing, and when Clabe admits to killing her grandfather, he collapses in a seizure, and she is unable to shoot him.
There’s much that’s unspoken about the motives of the two principals, but something dark lies in Soledad’s past concerning her grandfather, whom she seems unreservedly to love. But Clabe’s rawness, his tetchy, contrary, brazen manner coincides with some desperate part of herself, and she somehow perceives him a naïf, an innocent. They engage in a feral lust, a mix of passions, but immediately after repel one another, and he is once more on his horse and moving through the landscape.
In the novel’s quiet coda, when Clabe encounters on his ride a jolly group who take him to a wedding, there is a moment when, alone in his bedroll after the wedding, something happens in the night, and he has a sensation of release and ease, a feeling that he might after all fit.
Clabe and Soledad’s story is almost absurd when reduced to summary—where Dostoyevsky would have explicated, Vliet intimates, and the details stand out clearly, even if they don’t seem to cohere. With the Dostoyevskian polarities of good and evil alternating in the principals, Clabe appears to serve reluctantly as a third-rate angel sent to free Soledad of a taboo relation. It’s Vliet’s sensibilities as a poet that allows this short novel to reveal something odd and disconcerting in terrain we thought was only the simple preserve of cowboys and Indians, cow towns and saloons, gunfighters and madames.
Chief among Dostoyevsky’s great novels are the colloquies, the great verbal outpourings of his characters� beliefs, sensations, and ruminations, which often are a muddle of inconsistencies and abrupt retractions. Vliet’s characters speak tersely, and there are no long speeches, ever, but there is the same contrariness and failure to pin the talk on what is being felt or understood. But it’s not just this lack of dialectic clarity that correlates with Dostoyevsky, since it can be easily argued that most real-world talk is also just fatuous blather and/or phatic civility. As in Dostoyevsky’s novels, Vliet intimates a religious/spiritual realm, and the two principals in Solitudes speak with an underlying urgency to connect with and understand something larger—whether each other or the world and the way and why of it.
Vliet’s strategy is to alienate the reader from his principal character almost from the outset. In 1881 Texas, somewhere in the range of Austin and San Antonio, four men are rounding up strays (and perhaps collecting a few extras) for their cattle drive. After a harsh ice storm rolls through, the four welcome a well-appointed, stately Mexican to join their breakfast campfire. Something about this “Meskin� rattles 24-year-old Clabe, and he suddenly shoots him dead. The other men don’t make much of this but allow Clabe is tetchy, and they help to bury the body and make plans to sell the fine horse in a distant county.
The distinguished old Mexican had a cardboard picture of a young woman in a white dress that he’d tried to show Clabe and the others, and Clabe decides he’s going to find this woman. The course of the novel is set, and the main character is a racist killer. It takes some work hanging with Clabe, difficult as he is to like or understand.
Before Clabe sets out on his quest, he further alienates the reader by raping and leaving the young woman he’d been wooing. There is some faint echo of comedy in the sexual maneuverings to penetrate her long johns, but his conquest and callous flight rub the wrong way. …Which is immediately contrasted with his winning sweet-talk to the cook from whom he gets a quick breakfast and provisions for his quest. Clabe heads to San Antonio, contracts cholera, and after two days of riding while sick, falls from his horse unconscious. He is nursed by a scrabbling mason/farmer/sheepherder and his wife. During his sickness there are visions of Clabe’s short life: an unrepentant lefty, red-haired, freckled, prone to seizures, beaten by his father till he runs away, aged nine, and settles in with an old couple who cares for him until they die a few years later. After three months of recuperation and working the farmstead (building a fence, fetching the ton of stones to build a chimney, and lovemaking with the unhappy wife), Clabe lights out with a stolen rifle, coffee pot, and a scrub horse.
The subsequent wandering is entertaining, and Vliet’s writing makes compelling Clabe’s solitary activities in the rugged landscape. Clabe eventually reaches the small town in the highlands that the old Mexican had established. He also finds the woman he’d sought, the Mexican’s granddaughter, Soledad, who is now running the nearby estate/hacienda. There is a shift in the narrative, and for a long while Vliet slants the story from Soledad’s perspective, but there is something unspoken in this version of things, just as there is with Clabe’s. Clabe is hired on to garden and tend the fruiting trees. The two begin a wary dance, as Soledad is certain Clabe had something to do with her grandfather’s disappearance. The two are drawn to one another, but there is also disgust and loathing, and when Clabe admits to killing her grandfather, he collapses in a seizure, and she is unable to shoot him.
There’s much that’s unspoken about the motives of the two principals, but something dark lies in Soledad’s past concerning her grandfather, whom she seems unreservedly to love. But Clabe’s rawness, his tetchy, contrary, brazen manner coincides with some desperate part of herself, and she somehow perceives him a naïf, an innocent. They engage in a feral lust, a mix of passions, but immediately after repel one another, and he is once more on his horse and moving through the landscape.
In the novel’s quiet coda, when Clabe encounters on his ride a jolly group who take him to a wedding, there is a moment when, alone in his bedroll after the wedding, something happens in the night, and he has a sensation of release and ease, a feeling that he might after all fit.
Clabe and Soledad’s story is almost absurd when reduced to summary—where Dostoyevsky would have explicated, Vliet intimates, and the details stand out clearly, even if they don’t seem to cohere. With the Dostoyevskian polarities of good and evil alternating in the principals, Clabe appears to serve reluctantly as a third-rate angel sent to free Soledad of a taboo relation. It’s Vliet’s sensibilities as a poet that allows this short novel to reveal something odd and disconcerting in terrain we thought was only the simple preserve of cowboys and Indians, cow towns and saloons, gunfighters and madames.
March 17, 2016
I read this novel a long time ago, and I don't remember much about it, other than it's a beautifully written and evocative book about a drifting cowboy back in a time when a person could get "lost" in vast landscapes.
February 25, 2018
The writing is excellent. Some sections soar with fine wordsmithing, but I found the story slow and uninteresting, not sure where it was heading and dissatisfied how it finished.
December 23, 2008
Well written and enjoyable. I don't think Vliet wrote much other long fiction. I know he was also a poet.
August 9, 2015
Great book, would have given it more stars if I could.
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