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Our Savage
Matt Pavelich
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. 270 pages.
“Home, you see, is the place to which one returns, even when there is nothing whatever to recommend it.”
So says Danny Savage, the larger-than-life title character of this first novel by Matt Pavelich. “Too large a baby to pass through anyone’s hips, he was cut out of his mother with a midwife’s septic knife” in 1865 in eastern Europe. Named Danilo Lazich, he grows to nearly seven feet tall and becomes a highwayman who is self-educated in the ways and academic disciplines of the world; later, in the military in Vienna, he becomes part of Empress Elisabeth’s gallery of human anomalies (where he is known to the empress as “our savage”), and is implicated in her assassination. He eventually gains passage to the United States, under the name Danny Savage and at the cost of marriage to Stoja, a woman who will always remain as distinct from him as possible:
There was something unobtainable in the woman but it was no part of her body. They submitted to each other in Ilmograd, Trieste, Marseilles, and even more gruesomely at sea. She bruised him with her enthusiasm for it. Grimly she rode, hands on his chest, muscle gathering and twisting at the small of her back and along her haunches to drive her down onto him. Savage supposed that he would take as much of this as she might care to offer, she was made for it. Still, there were places in her out of reach and chafed beyond his soothing. Never, before Stoja, had he heard a human being snarl with pleasure. She seemed to want to extinguish him, and after their every uncoupling he would lie there feeling that she had partly succeeded, and that it was, whether intentional or not, a gift.
In America, Savage finds his place out west, first in Montana and then in Wyoming. He insists on making his way on his own terms. “Tomorrow,” Stoja tells him, “we will find work”:
“You will pretend to be an honest man, pretend it from now on. Have we been anywhere where there are more farms? Where there are farms, there is work.”
“Where there are farms,” he said, “there is monotony. I do not see myself husbanding animals, splashed with their feces. It always comes to that. Farmers. Do you know the uses they would have for me?”
“Work, I said.” Stoja drew apart from him. “That for you would be even worse than this? You will not dirty your hands?”
“With the soils of my choosing. To my own ends.”
Savage is true to his word. He is the American immigrant pure and simple, made even moreso by his physical immensity, his inability to be anonymous or to fade into the background. In a quirky narrative style that jumps forward by years or decades at a clip and makes little attempt to fill in backstory details, Matt Pavelich traces this equally quirky American life. Everything is large in the world of Danny Savage: the American West; his daughter Angelene and grandson Red Capich, with whom he has largely unusual relationships; his wife’s shrewish character; his eclectic and unending skills, interests, ambitions, and propensity to grab opportunity lustily and unashamedly.
Our Savage offers, from the edges of Europe, a portrait of the American spirit that is by turns grim and comical, exotic and mundane, inspiring and maddening, endearing and frightening. It is all of these things because Danny Savage is elemental, a man who makes a full life at the edge.
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