Munif’s book deliberately rejects frontier-pioneer romance for communal epic.

Evidence

Against such a backdrop we are better positioned to revisit Updike’s complaint that Munif was too ignorant of novelistic conventions and insufficiently Westernized to convert his material into a memorable pioneering adventure. Might Cities of Salt represent less a missed opportunity than a canny effort to push back, imaginatively and politically, against the frontier novel as heroically individualized pioneer romance? Instead of crafting an adventurer who faces down some Persian Gulf version of the wilderness and Native Americans, Munif summoned to life a radically different kind of historical panorama, a violent conflict on a communal scale, as the uprooted Bedouin fought for ecological subsistence, cultural dignity, and scraps of power against an advancing petro-capitalist imperialism in league with an emergent oligarchic client state. … The narrative voice of Cities (disdained by Updike as that of “a campfire explainer”) enables Munif to recast genre by blending elements drawn from oral fabulation into the epic historical novel. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 260

Categorization

• XREF: Directly overturns the classic American frontier-adventure frame (Turner thesis, pioneer individualism) applied in ch18’s Updike contrast; ties to ch13’s interrogation of who counts as human when the poor are animalized.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘oral fabulation into the epic historical novel’ is a genre-recasting move rather than naivety.