The three narratives in Now I Surrender never quite cohere ... y the end, with the Geronimo material, you sense that Enrigue is filibustering, leaning too heavily on his research, as he introduces character after character and explores every wrinkle of the negotiations over Geronimo’s fate ... Here’s one reason I love reading Enrigue anyway. The tough guys in his fiction often have effeminate sides (some of their boots have improbable heels) and they’re always taking miniature pratfalls ... Enrigue’s novels are not the places to come if you are nostalgic for notional simplicities of the American past. He’s one of the best we have, and he’s not done pushing against conventions.
The author’s approach to this cataclysmic history is to shred it, reassemble it, and reframe it, offering the satisfactions of Westerns, historical epics, and metafiction even as he overturns all three traditions. Enrigue has a penchant for shooting the facts of history through a prism of the absurd ... The resulting novel about this vanished country, Apachería, is slightly unclassifiable; I’d start by describing it as a darkly comic, revisionist Western for the age of autofiction. But there’s more to it than gleeful perversions of genre ... Enrigue is an erudite, charismatic raconteur...and his novel distills a byzantine swirl of historical events through the lives of a handful of very colorful characters. Just as compelling are the ways that he freshly revises the Western ... With so many stories rolled into more than 450 pages, the novel does slow down in parts ... As in his other novels, however, loose ends in many cases get tied up later on, and a seemingly chaotic tangle of yarns suddenly becomes cohesive.
A pendant work of revisionism that centers on Geronimo’s defiance and defeat, is a longer, more complicated novel ... The book is by turns brilliant, provocative, digressive and dull—abounding in talent but confusingly at odds with itself ... Despite a concluding chapter that struggles to make these storylines converge, Now I Surrender remains frustratingly splintered ... Stubbornly fights against the kind of engagement its author is preternaturally good at arousing. This distinguishes it unfavorably from the traditional western, which, however reductive or politically wrongheaded, has always known how to keep an audience interested.
