(Courtesy of Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House)
First published by Coffee House Press in October 2017, Hernan Diaz's "In the Distance" was one of the most significant literary debuts of a singular decade in American letters.
A corollary (and partial rejoinder) to the stylistically febrile oeuvres of such Revisionist Western progenitors as filmmaker Robert Altman ("McCabe & Mrs. Miller"), fellow director Sam Peckinpah ("The Wild Bunch"; "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia") and novelist/screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer ("Nog"; "Two-Lane Blacktop"; his adaptation of Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid"), it earned the 2019 Whiting Award for Fiction (whose judges cited Diaz's antipodean command of "language that can be plainspoken and wildly, even cosmically, evocative"); the biennial William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (endowed and conferred by the 1940 Drama winner's eponymous foundation in conjunction with the Stanford University Libraries) — and a 2018 Pulitzer nomination that lauded Diaz's explication of the "extremes of the human condition."
More recently, Diaz received a 2023 Fiction Prize for "Trust," a palimpsestic epic that cemented his profile as a key lodestar of contemporary Anglophone fiction. And bibliophiles who may have read "In the Distance" in its original trade paperback edition (or logged it in their reading lists!) now have the opportunity to immerse themselves in Diaz's protean mid-19th century milieu through its first hardcover edition, released today by Riverhead Books.
In contrast to some of its antecedents, "In the Distance" is keenly influenced by Diaz's multivalent identity as an immigrant Argentine American who also was partially raised and educated in such disparate locales as Sweden and the United Kingdom. Popular midcentury 20th century Western writers like Zane Grey and 1950 Fiction winner A. B. Guthrie Jr. tended to be white men of longstanding Midwestern pedigrees, often with journalism experience that led a pronounced (and occasionally uncritical) viscerality to their work. In a pre-television culture where popular fiction magazines rivaled the reach of the film and radio industries as a form of mass entertainment, story beats inevitably trumped modernistic introspection.
"You know, the Western is such an oddly marginal genre," Diaz reflected in a 2019 interview with Aaron Bady of The Nation. "You'd expect it to be central to the American literary canon, because it's so perfect as an ideological tool. It’s the culmination of individualism, it’s an ideological tale of the birth of the nation, it romanticizes genocide.… And yet most people will be hard-pressed to name three Western writers before [2007 Fiction winner] Cormac McCarthy or [1986 Fiction winner] Larry McMurtry. And it has been overshadowed by film in such an interesting way. Compared to detective fiction or science fiction — both of which have had massive impacts on literature — the Western didn’t fulfill its promise or [its] potential."
Diaz's belletristic gambit commences circa 1850, when Håkan Söderström and his brother Linus are sent from Sweden to the United States. Separated en route, young Håkan winds up in San Francisco before setting out on foot to find Linus in New York City. The ensuing journey takes him through a fledgling and often vexatious nation on the precipice of the Civil War, prompting a range of encounters with the gold prospectors, prescient naturalists and venal constabularies who suffused the era's nebulous (if inherently intersectional) frontier.
To learn more about the Riverhead Books edition of "In the Distance," click here.
Related
Earlier this year, Diaz and Pulitzer Board member Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke about "In the Distance" in a colloquy recorded for the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast. Click here to listen.