In the Distance

"Finalist"

"I’ve given this book to several people in my family as well. I think it might be one of my favourite books ever, though I’ve read it only once. The story follows the life of Hakan, a Swedish immigrant who moves to the United States with his brother in the 1800s. We see all the difficulties he endures and the compelling people he meets as he makes his way to the frontier, moving through these huge landscapes that are just astounding—the nature writing is beautiful. It’s a quiet coming-of-age story, and I love it. Apart from its staggering beauty, this book is an interesting one to talk about because it opens the discussion to Westerns as historical fiction, which is maybe an angle we don’t fully appreciate when we talk about Westerns. Not all Westerns are historical fiction—think of the movie Hell or High Water , for example. And some are just barely historical fiction, like No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy , which is set in the 1980s. But a lot of the genre’s big entries are historical fiction: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, for example, or Blood Meridian by McCarthy. Like these books , In the Distance delivers a critically complicated depiction of colonization, a long and difficult journey across a landscape, and a cast of compelling characters so beautifully rendered that they all feel real. Its publication journey was also pretty amazing: Diaz answered an open call for submissions from Coffee House Press, an indie publisher in the States. He didn’t have an agent, and I’m pretty sure he had no prior publications, certainly no books . In the Distance went on to become a finalist for a Pulitzer . It’s a brilliant book. Amazing."

"Hernan Diaz is an Argentinian-American author. He also lived as a child in Sweden, and the main character in In the Distance is a young Swedish man called Håkan, who goes by ‘Hawk.’ In the Distance encourages us to consider more fully who these people were who were moving through the West. What were their stories, what motivated them to travel in this space? It also reminds us that, while the Western is often considered a uniquely American form—that is, the United States—it’s important to note that there were many other writers across the world who were drawn to the genre. In scholarship today, we recognize the need to distinguish between US Westerns, Mexican Westerns, German Westerns, Spaghetti Westerns, Canadian Westerns, and so on. It’s a global form. Hernan Diaz’s novel reroutes the traditional trajectory of the Western by tracing the convoluted travels of his main character—who goes from Europe to Argentina, California, the Midwest, and all the way to Alaska. At the beginning of the book, he starts out with his brother Linus. The two men leave Europe and try to head specifically for New York but end up losing each other right way. Hawk then ends up on a long trip that eventually takes him to San Francisco and the gold rush, though his goal is really to return to his brother back East. He is constantly thwarted along the way. He meets numerous shady figures and undergoes all these trials and conflicts as he tries to reunite with his brother. The novel is really about the un settling of the West, and it revisits that classic hero of the Western novel: the ‘American Adam.’ This is the figure who tries to throw off history, tries to sever his family ties, and tries to break free from the past in order to experience rebirth and renewal in the so-called Edenic spaces of the West. But what Håkan finds instead is a devastating lack of connection and belonging. He experiences a kind of soul-crushing loneliness and a very limited and truncated life. I should say that the novel also contains one of the most memorable and disturbing kisses in the literary history of the Western. I won’t spoil it for the people who haven’t read the book yet. But the novel is beautifully written, and it makes us reassess the foundations, not only of the Western, but of many dominant cultural myths and fantasies of America itself. It doesn’t appear to. I can think of all those filmic and television Westerns that are profoundly popular today. Like Yellowstone . I’m in Montana, and it’s had a major impact here with tourism and travel. The Western may be an antique genre, but it’s not antique in that it’s no longer useful or serviceable. It’s antique in that it’s a genre we’ve seen re-imagined time and time again. I think a lot of people have plundered or reused elements of the Western to tell new stories and to critique the very foundations of the beliefs and fantasies that often fuel the genre."

""In the Distance," by Hernán Diaz"