Slow Fade

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THE RETURN OF Slow Fade is a fine thing. It’s Rudy Wurlitzer’s greatest work of fiction, both as a novel and as a screenplay, and one of the best American books there is. I’ll get to the screenplay in a moment. Slow Fade the book is based on Wurlitzer’s personal experiences with noted film director Sam Peckinpah, and also with the American Sixties dharma trip in India and elsewhere. Either subject would have been a fine basis for a novel. Only Rudy’s restless mind could make one story of both, merging two seemingly disparate things into one mad world — one compact, entertaining, edgy, tragic, epic narrative.

One of the underlying themes of Rudy’s Westerns — Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Walker, and the unfilmed Zebulon — is men who became famous heroes by dragging other, less famous men to their deaths. Pat Garrett and Billy are responsible for at least a score of killings in Rudy’s screenplay: shooting deaths that were unnecessary, that could have been avoided, had the protagonists not been so vainglorious. William Walker is even more lethally heroic. The “gray-eyed man of destiny” has a body count in the thousands (not including cholera). And the relentless Captain pursues Zebulon, the mountain man, no matter how great the collateral damage.

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