Joseph Boyden, "The True Sorrows of Calamity Jane"

One of the pieces in the 2009 summer fiction edition of The Walrus, this is also the best Western short story I can remember reading in a long time. Understatement goes a very long way in a genre which often yields to an impulse for rootin'-tootin' purple prose. But Boyden doesn't eschew all genre cliches; consider the ending:

I need to go now. I am the bastard son of Calamity Jane, of the West, and, truthfully, I'm already gone. But you must know this by now. Facts and lies, they are so often the same when all you get is glimpses. But I know the truth. I am her blood. She was my mother.

I am only assuming that Boyden doesn't write many Westerns. (Would The Walrus have invited him to contribute to this issue if he had?) Harping on the mythographical qualities of the genre is itself one of this genre's defining attributes; it may be, though, that in a post-generic age, this kind of ultra-conformity to the standards is something only a greenhorn would try.