In the Distance

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Hernan Diaz's In the Distance is kind of a Western--it has Indians, outlaws, wagon trains, and a sheriff, but it feels a great deal different. That Diaz's name is upside down on the cover indicates that this is almost an anti-Western, a flip of the usual. That's because his hero, a Swedish immigrant named Håkan, is trying to go from West to East.

American exploration and settlement was always in a westerly direction, but Håkan, traveling from Sweden to America with his brother Linus, gets on the wrong boat and ends up in San Francisco instead. Knowing no English, he is desperate to travel eastward to New York to find his brother.

That the story is told by an older Håkan while on a boat in Alaska may tell us something, but Håkan has a picaresque journey. He starts in mining camp during the gold rush, ends up the pet of some sinister crime organization (because he does not know English at this point, we see what he sees, and misunderstands as much as we do). He then encounters a naturalist, Lorimer, who is a great character, who teaches him simple medicine. He fills Håkan with wonder: "But the main virtue his brother and the naturalist shared was their ability to endow the world with meaning. The stars, the seasons, the forest—Linus had stories about them all, and through these stories life was contained, becoming something that could be examined and understood."

Eventually he treks across the desert and plains alone, except for a horse and a burro. Much of the book is Diaz trying to describe the amazing emptiness and beauty of this desert of grass. "Håkan realized now that he had always thought that these vast territories were empty—that he had believed they were inhabited only during the short period of time during which travelers were passing through them, and that, like the ocean in the wake of a ship, solitude closed up after the riders. He further understood that all those travelers, himself included, were, in fact, intruders."

The key moment in Håkan's story is when he takes up with a wagon train and helps them defend themselves against "the brethren" (which I took to be Mormons), and kills several of them. A legend about him grows--he is known as "the Hawk" and because of his great physical size he becomes like a bogeyman in the imagination of settlers.

One can almost feel the physical torment of Håkan's travels, much of which are on foot. His feet and hands are twisted, his skin blistered from the sun (only his teeth remain intact). In his later years he lives almost a Zen-like experience, not hearing his own voice for weeks at a time, living off trapped animals, stitching together his own clothes (to add to his legend, he wears a coat made of a cougar skin, complete with head and tail).

In the Distance is beautifully written and at times hallucinatory, as if we had just stumbled across the desert and didn't know if what we are seeing is real. It has enough shootings to please the traditional Western fan, but it may be too introspective for that kind of reader. I know I was engrossed.