SOURCE: McGraw, Erin. “Brute Force: Violent Stories.” Georgia Review 54, no. 2 (summer 2000): 351–66.

In the following excerpt, McGraw discusses the recurring theme of violence in American fiction and offers a positive assessment of Close Range.

American fiction has a lot of hallmark themes: individualism and self-definition, a sense of sin and fear of redemption, a strong relationship with (or mourning for) nature. But probably more than any of these, and threaded through all of them, is a sense of violence as an ineradicable component of human nature. In novels and stories across the history of American literature, the possibility and range of human brutality has remained a bedrock subject, an issue writers can't seem to stay away from. What is the fascination for so many?

A list of contemporary names all but generates itself: Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy—and of their forbears, too, back through...