The Cowboy and the Cossack

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I AM perhaps the only person I know who chooses the novels she reads based on whether or not the author has chosen to start the book in question with an epigraph. I am inordinately (perhaps ridiculously) fond of these short quotations at the beginnings of novels that somehow suggest the theme of what follows. My response to a book with a well-chosen epigraph reminds me of the immortal line spoken by Renée Zellweger’s character to Tom Cruise’s character in the movie Jerry Maguire: “You had me at hello.”

Of course, I can’t tell if a book has an epigraph or not unless I open it up, so I’m initially dependent on all the usual clues: the catchiness of the title, what I already know about the author, reviews I’ve read, recommendations from friends. But when it comes right down to it, for me at least, a good epigraph can make all the difference.

I don’t remember where, or even exactly when, I first came across Clair Huffaker’s novel The Cowboy and the Cossack. I seem to remember taking the book off a shelf in the fiction section of a library, so if I read it shortly after it was published in 1973, it would have almost certainly have been the public library in Stillwater, Oklahoma, but it somehow doesn’t seem to quite jibe with what I recall of the physical layout of that particular library. (I’m writing this introduction on an uncharacteristically hot August day in Seattle, so evocative of the years I spent in Oklahoma, and I pause here for an online look at the catalogs of the three public libraries where I might first have found Huffaker’s novel—Stillwater’s, Tulsa’s, and Seattle’s—and find that none currently own copies of it.

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