Trust, the second novel by Hernan Diaz, Argentinian-American writer and academic, pleased critics, readers, prize committees including the Pulitzer’s, and a former president (the one who tells us about his favorite new books). Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, originally published by the small, independent Coffee House Press, won a Whiting Award, and, on the back of Diaz’s new celebrity, has been done up by Riverhead, first in a new paperback in March of this year, and now in a special edition hardcover.
In the Distance is a worldly western. In the mid 19th century, teenaged Håkan Söderström and his brother Linus leave their family’s impoverished farm in Sweden, hoping to get to “Nujårk” in America. But they are separated, and when Håkan’s ship docks in San Francisco, he is determined to go East where he hopes they’ll be reunited. Delays follow. Håkan is kidnapped, hired, tutored, loved, hated, attacked, and nearly killed, meeting with every kind of American adventure available west of the Mississippi. Long-haired, tough, and terrifically tall, he lives mostly out in the open, wearing a patchwork outfit in which “the European peasant, the California trapper, and the itinerant Indian had come together on an equal footing.” Eventually, he becomes a folk hero known by a corruption of his exotic name: “the Hawk.”
Diaz is a steady and cautious journeyman, and he packs a lot of supplies. The physical details are all there, in the desert, dry lake, prairie, or mining town. And as Håkan, briefly apprenticed to an eccentric naturalist, will become a frontier surgeon, there is to be much description of guts and gore, too. Sometimes Diaz overdoes the scene settings, and one hears a hint of the fussy antiquarian, as in the boudoir of a mad lady who keeps Håkan as a toyboy early in the story: “There were silver-framed mirrors, knickknacks and gilded books with brass clasps on little marquetry tables with spindle legs…” This writer does often resort to the list, in lieu of the more strenuous and eventually rewarding description that follows the eye around the environment. But Håkan’s sight of some buffalo is well written, and would serve nicely as a classroom example of making the familiar strange, registering from tail to head how, “as if nature had changed its mind halfway through it, the animal swelled in a stupendous, monstrous fashion, suddenly becoming thicker and taller.”
The story and its pacing are a little curious, as the rapid and picaresque episodes give way to a slower sequence involving some ravening vigilantes, and Håkan’s period of isolation in a burrow of who knows how many decades. The western sky is huge, and so too is the country between here and the east coast, as Håkan is to discover. But the novel does not swell in proportion. The mishaps that get Håkan on the trading expedition in Alaska, where the novel starts before flashing back, are cleverly enough contrived, and the very end, with its evocation of Frankenstein, is rather good. Diaz, though, can’t quite save the novel from feeling like a slight and slightly compromised version of a heftier work that goes further and to higher promontories. Håkan might lose purpose, wander, and for a time settle by the fire, but the plot could have used more echoes and returns, more marks of time and transformation.
As in the picaresque, comic characters who verge on caricature are featured and dropped — one, a dubious salesman named Jarvis, is especially good — but In the Distance, with its questioning of western myth and its po-faced theme of alienation, is not really that kind of novel. It needs another slow development besides Håkan’s odd indefinite adult growth, the medical marvel which makes him yet more of an outcast. What we get instead are ruminations in the cave on those loved and lost, and then, after Håkan emerges, the shock of the new amidst all the western trading and settling that he has avoided.
It is almost as if Diaz along with Håkan has lost confidence among, not to say in, relatively civilized people. Back in a mining town called Clangston which since his last visit has greatly expanded, bewildered Håkan tries to take in the commercial bustle. These sights are as new to him as the buffalo, but this time rather than fascination and writerly care we are given generic, almost provisional description: “In bright, hectic showrooms, customers examined each piece of merchandise with expert eyes, gravely compared different items presented by aproned salesmen, haggled, bought things by the dozen.”
All of this, built on gold (and some glittering substitutes) means little to our hulking hero. It’s a lesson taught in an odd way: Håkan’s long, Crusoe-like hiatus, this dispiriting crowd of featureless “customers” and “salesmen,” and the somewhat hasty maneuvering that brings him and us back to Alaska. You half wonder what happened to the novel you were reading. We can speculate that In the Distance wasn’t, it turned out, the richest vein, and nearly went bust while Diaz was writing it, but still, we ought to be impressed by what he was able to salvage.
FICTION
In the Distance
By Hernan Diaz
Riverhead Books
Published October 15, 2024
