In the Distance

Hernán Díaz’s first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book is gorgeously written and meticulously researched. The West’s huge, startling landscapes loom on every page. But the real genius here is the novel’s “reverse epic” structure—how Díaz takes a young Swedish immigrant who gets off his ship at the wrong port (San Francisco) and sends him traveling east, against the migrant tides, in search of his brother. The journey doesn’t go as planned. Håkan makes friends and stymies enemies. Stereotypes warp and tumble as Håkan (and the reader) are forever transformed. The… show more.

Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the story begins with young Hakan Soderstrom leaving Sweden with his brother Linus for a less blighted life in America. After they’re separated, Hakan tries to walk from San Francisco to New York to find his brother. Instead he meets up with a deluded Irish gold prospector, a toothless dance hall queen who dresses him in velvet, dangerous Civil War soldiers, a visionary naturalist, and a host of other fantastic characters, as he wanders for years. No line links these characters except the wild needs of this radically revised picture of the West, and I… show more.

Díaz’s remarkable twist on the western follows one of two Swedish brothers who, en route to a new life in America, boards the wrong boat in Portsmouth. He ends up in San Francisco and decides to walk to New York to find his brother. On the way he meets immigrants, prospectors, lawmen, Native Americans, soldiers, miners, and more, getting a bounty put on his head and gaining mythic status as a man-beast. Díaz mentions only a few real places, but his descriptions of the landscape are so clear that you know where the nameless places he describes are even if… show more.