Percival Everett’s Grand Canyon, Inc. relates the tragicomic tale of crack rifle shot Winchell Nathaniel “Rhino” Tanner; his sidekick Simpson Trane, aka BB (named for the BB pellet lodged inextricably in his skull); and their battle to “acquire” the Grand Canyon by constructing an amusement park on Plateau Point.

Matched with an artwork by Richard Prince, the publication is part of Gagosian’s Picture Books, an imprint conceived by author Emma Cline and dedicated to publishing fiction by leading authors alongside contributions by celebrated contemporary artists.

Prince’s photograph, Untitled (Original Cowboy), which depicts the sandstone buttes of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park on the Arizona-Utah border, sees the artist continue his long engagement with the iconography of the American West. For this series, instead of rephotographing and manipulating images clipped from magazine advertisements, as he has done before, Prince visited the area to seek out quintessential viewpoints established by preceding photographers. “Prince is so wily and wry, in ways that echo Everett,” says Emma Cline. “They are both tricksters who take a sideways look at the mythology of the West and reveal it anew.”

This is a very short book (out of 126 pages of text, at least 36 are blank or nearly blank for chapter dividers), so when I saw it on the library shelf next to [b:Glyph|355818|Glyph|Percival Everett|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1331430543s/355818.jpg|1270378], I figured why not? I had a vague sense of Everett as being a little experimental or weird, and this seemed like a harmless way to dip a toe in before committing to something larger.

It's a pretty straightforward tale of an over-the-top character, Rhino Tanner, who likes to shoot animals and who manages to con the bankrupt government into letting him develop a gift shop which metastasizes into an amusement park/resort in the Grand Canyon—and his estranged son Niko, who joins local native tribes in opposing the development. Put a big Boom! at the end and nature wipes the slate clean. The telling is appropriately tongue-in-cheek, but the satire has lost its bite with the metastasizing of U.S. corporate culture in general.

It's not bad; it's entertaining enough for the brief time it'll take you to read. But it's very slight, and while I haven't been moved to avoid him, I don't feel like I've gained any sense of what the rest of Percival Everett's writing might be like. ( )

A quirky story about a man who wants to purchase the Grand Canyon. It's a surreal look at the modern day consumer culture in which it's assumed everything can be bought. ( )

In which the commercial world decides to seize their opportunity to make some real money off of one's of the world's great natural wonders. This is an amusing exercise in absurdism; it has an Abbeyesque feel overlain with some magical realism episodes which give it a touch of Continental feel. ( )