In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz

I became aware of In the Distance soon after it came out in 2017, I believe, though I don't remember how I became aware of it. I was surprised and thrilled to find a copy at the Goodwill in Greenwich Village not long after it had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. I picked it up and contemplated reading it several times between then and now. I would read the blurb and it just never felt like the thing I wanted to be reading at whatever particular moment I found myself in. It was this tweet from last September that nudged me closer to reading it. I decided to read it "soon," and soon finally became now last Sunday. 

Let me start by saying this book was stunning. It was sometimes hard to read, one troubling event piles on top of another, again and again as the book goes on. There's hardly a break from the trouble. And yet, it's beautiful. 

Early on while reading In the Distance I thought it was like a picaresque. The book is episodic as Håkan, a Swedish immigrant who arrives in San Francisco in the early 19th century as a boy, picks up with – or is picked up by – different characters. Some are benefactors, some are using him. Each chapter presented a new adventure or circumstance in his travels. But then other characters largely disappear from the book after one particularly bad episode. Håkan spends months and years in deep solitude. Though, with a couple exceptions, the time he spends with people is no less lonely than his time alone. People in this book are terrifying for the harm they are prepared to do to one another. Håkan begins the book as a total innocent, and some element of that innocence stays with him throughout. Meanwhile his notoriety  grows as he unwittingly becomes a figure of myth across the West. In the public imagination he is a person dramatically different from the real Håkan, but the real Håkan – filled with shame over his own actions – seems partly to believe that he deserves this public censure. He avoids other humans because he fears what they will do to him, but also because he fears what they will think of him. He is afraid to face them. The book itself represents the first time he tells his own story to anyone. (It's told in the third person, but it's framed as a narrative he gives of his own life to fellow passengers on an iced-in boat near Alaska.)

Unless I'm forgetting something, this is only the second Western novel I've read, the other being Butcher's Crossing, which I also found hard to read yet beautiful. The two books do inhabit the same moment for a stretch – the events of Butcher's Crossing take place in the space of a year, while In the Distance spans decades. In the Distance imagines a person inhabiting a long period of American history and westward expansion, and yet so removed from the world of humans that the external events of history are almost invisible to him.