When the director Bart Layton—whose new film, “Crime 101,” opens on Friday—recently reflected on his favorite novels, he realized that many were what might be termed anti-Westerns. “Most Westerns are great adventures about risk and endeavor and glory,” he said. The books that he loves invert that mythology, focussing on characters in situations that don’t necessarily conclude in triumph and dominion, and depicting a different kind of self-discovery. “Like, if I go into this, I’ll be confronted by the measure of myself. I’ll be made to confront the question, ‘Am I of substance?’ ” His remarks have been edited and condensed.
Butcher’s Crossing
by John Williams
A few years ago, I made a film called “American Animals,” which is about a group of kids who commit a heist. They do it partly because of the financial benefits, but more because they want to see what lies on the other side of a line that should never be crossed. The main character in “Butcher’s Crossing,” Andrews, is in a similar kind of situation. Andrews is an educated guy—he’s a student at Harvard in the late eighteen-hundreds—but he feels like he doesn’t understand some important things. Like what hardship feels like, what it means to be challenged on a more essential level, and the essence of being a man. So, to try and gain that understanding, he leaves school and signs up for a buffalo hunt in Kansas—an experience that turns out to bring not knowledge but, rather, disillusionment.
Days Without End
by Sebastian Barry
This is the story of two queer soldiers who meet amid the complete brutality of the Civil War. To me, it’s a book about vulnerability that is set at the edge of an incredibly violent moment in history. The main characters are surrounded by the most abject violence, occupying a world that can sometimes feel lawless—and yet, they are able to create a small haven through their love.
Like several of the other books I am recommending here, Barry’s characters’ voices aren’t particularly articulate, because they don’t belong to educated narrators. But what emerges as a result is, I think, a particularly poetic and immersive reading experience.
All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
I haven’t read this book since I was nineteen or twenty, but I still think of it as my favorite. It’s a bildungsroman about two young boys in the American Southwest in the middle of the twentieth century. What’s always stayed with me about it is the way that it shows how human purity becomes corrupted, and how, in the book, its analogue can only be found in horses. The horses, not the people, are the unimpeachable souls, whereas we see how humans get it all wrong because they can be driven by the wrong things, like the pursuit of wealth and status.
True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey
Like “Days Without End,” this one has a narrator who isn’t entirely literate, a fictionalized version of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. “True History” is framed as though it were written testimony left behind by Kelly. It feels very raw, and there’s an innocence and a truthfulness to it.
Kelly is a folk hero who committed murders and robberies in the late nineteenth century. He justified these crimes as acts of resistance against authority—his parents were sent to Australia from Ireland, along with tens of thousands of other Irish people, and he grew up in pure poverty. Carey’s book expands on Kelly’s claim that his criminal activity was a response to the violence the English committed against the Irish, both in Europe and, now, in their colony. In the book, those cruelties, along with the cruelties of Kelly’s own experience, change his perspective. They also shape the way that you think about the novel’s central questions, which are also questions that, I suppose, I’m interested in in “Crime 101.” Questions like, Who’s really on the right side of the law? Who does it protect, and who is a victim of it?