The New York Times
Scott Phillips doesn't really write crime stories. He writes about criminal behaviors -- how they originate, how they transform character, how they become part of the cultural norm and, most incisively, how they flourish in certain environments. If you want to look at it historically, as he does with wit and gusto in Cottonwood, ''crime'' is just a name for behaviors that fall out of social fashion. — Marilyn Stasio
Publishers Weekly
Western epic, black comedy and soft porn are cleverly spliced in this genre-bending offering from Phillips (The Walkaway; The Ice Harvest), which relates the experiences of Bill Ogden, sometime farmer, sometime saloon-owner, sometime photographer in 1870s Kansas. Ogden, 27, is a self-taught Greek and Latin scholar and a sexual libertine capable of seducing almost any woman he encounters. Estranged from his wife, he never brags about his peccadilloes, although it seems that his devotion to oral sex sets him apart from rivals and makes him the heart's desire of the voracious women who seem to be everywhere on the frontier. The story, such as it is, centers on the arrival of Marc Leval and his lovely wife, Maggie, in the tiny farm community of Cottonwood. Marc capriciously selects Bill as a partner in his scheme to attract Texas drovers to a railhead, while Maggie plays a less-than-discreet game of spider and fly with Bill, the Kansas Casanova. In the meantime, an outlaw family membarks on a crime spree that eventually pits Bill against Marc and sends Bill and Maggie fleeing. Jumping ahead 20 years, Bill's story resumes in San Francisco, where he is making his way as a photographer and sexual athlete. He learns that Maggie, from whom he is long separated, has returned to Cottonwood, so he abandons his life in California and returns, bent on rekindling their love affair. Bill's salaciousness rivals Don Juan's and he is utterly devoid of scruples, but his deadpan humor and cunning indifference to life's vicissitudes keep him likable. Lively pacing and artful prose lend polish to Phillips's cheerfully grotesque chronicle of western antics. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Frontier Guignol in post-Civil War Kansas and California of the 1870s and '80s. Unflappable Bill Ogden objects more to the quality of his wife Ninna's extramarital affairs than to their quantity. After all, he and Ninna, for all practical purposes, live apart, she outside of Cottonwood on their farm with surly son Clyde and he in town above his saloon. Bill's stated reason is that he's taking care of business, which includes not only the saloon but also a nascent career as a photographer; in reality, he dallies as often as his wife, and his droll first-person narrative combines amorality with a genuine, if laid-back, joie de vivre. He gleefully shoots holes through the bowler of Ninna's foppish latest, a pots-and-pans salesman named A.J. Harticourt, who later turns up mysteriously dead. Indeed, Cottonwood is a real Wild West town, but not in the way one might expect. Its colorful population includes a remarkably high number of hedonists and sociopaths, and there are a similarly large number of disappearances and random corpses. Foremost among the former is Katie Bender, who lives with her German-born mother and advertises herself as a mystic and miracle healer. At length, Bill learns that Katie and mom are serial killers with an impressive number of victims. When flashy industrialist Marc Leval comes from Chicago with beautiful wife Maggie and a plan to turn Cottonwood into a railroad boomtown, Bill quickly becomes Marc's partner and Maggie's lover. Marc's proposal proves unpopular, however, as townspeople threaten violence and more. After an unexpected shooting leads to a makeshift posse and Bill's drift away from corrupt Cottonwood, he heads for San Francisco, where his photographicbusiness thrives for more than a decade. On his return to Kansas, he finds Cottonwood gripped by a dramatic murder trial. The blazingly original Phillips (The Walkway, 2002, etc.) writes with deadpan humor and incisive irony. The story is shaggy, but its unique slant on the Old West is a major achievement. Agency: Watkins/Loomis
