Doc by Mary Doria Russell

"He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle. The disease took fifteen years to hollow out his lungs so completely they could no longer keep him alive. In all that time, he was allowed a single season of something like happiness."

So Mary Doria Russell begins her novel of the "single season" in the tumultuous life of Dr. John Henry Holliday, better known as Doc, companion of the Earp brothers and one of the shooters at the O. K. Corral.

Holliday has left his home in Georgia for the West only months after completing dental school, hoping that the dry air and sunshine will restore his health. As a classical pianist, conversant in French, Greek, and Latin, with a sly and ironic wit, he has little in common with the motley inhabitants of Texas and Kansas until he meets Maria Katarina Harony, known as Kate, who is a classically educated Hungarian whore. The unlikely couple heads for Dodge City, Kansas, where Doc can supplement his income as a dentist with gambling and dealing faro in the saloons when the Texas cowboys flood the town during the trail-drive season. There he begins the friendship with Morgan Earp, Wyatt Earp, and the other Earp brothers which will eventually lead to the famous gunfight.

The citizens of Dodge are all so fully realized by Russell that they form pictures in the mind's eye and their conversations sound in the ear. They become "real," with believable motivations leading to logical actions. Russell's Doc Holliday becomes a kind of Western Odysseus, tricked by fate into becoming a wanderer, a cultured Southern gentleman making his way the best he knows how in a strange and savage land.

This novel won't become a classic, but it is very well done, very charming, very engrossing. Recommended.

Side Note: As I read this, I saw and heard in my mind Val Kilmer in his portrayal of Doc Holliday in the movie Tombstone. I wonder if the author had him in mind when she shaped her story and her conversations.