In the Distance
Ostensibly set in the mid-19th century American West, In the Distance actually exists somewhere in the realm between the unlikely and the impossible.
As a teenager, Håkan and his older brother Linus—a fabulist who fills Håkan’s head with all manner of nonsense—are sent away from the family farm in Sweden to seek a better life in America. “Håkan and Linus, who had never even seen a picture of a city, hurried down to Gothenburg, hoping to spend a day or two there, but they barely had time to get on their ship to Portsmouth.”
The brothers become separated in Portsmouth where, it seems, no one in the busy port city speaks or understands Swedish, and Håkan ends up on a ship to San Francisco rather than his intended destination of New York. Upon arrival in California, the boy aims eastward, intending to cross the continent and find his brother, without whom he is at a loss to do anything but grow.
And grow he does, his stature soon surpassing most men’s. But he doesn’t stop there—he continues to grow into something of a giant and keeps growing. Even near the end of the book we are told, “Still, he had never stopped growing. Tight shoes were the first sign of a new spurt.” He is forever forced to cobble together new or expanded footwear and fashion or alter patchwork clothing to keep pace.
Leaving San Francisco, Håkan is taken in, more or less as slave labor, by a prospector and his family, but before long is forced to serve as a sex slave of sorts for the woman who controls an isolated mining town. He escapes and joins up with Lorimar, a naturalist wandering the West in search of lifeforms that will prove a theory that resembles a mutation of the nascent discovery of evolution. The growing boy is still unable to communicate well, and rather than teach Håkan English, Lorimar attempts to learn Swedish. Although he does not really understand the naturalist’s ideas, “Håkan felt his own past (with all that he thought he knew, with his father’s firm words, with the minister’s unquestioned doctrine, and even with his brother’s lovely stories) dissolve into the night and fade in the presence of the impressive and awful history he had just heard.”
Circumstances send him on his way again, and he falls in for a time with a wagon train (although traveling opposite his chosen direction). In a fight against raiders Håkan slaughters most of the attackers, but is blamed for killing the emigrants, the origin of a reputation as a murderous monster that will later grow to mythic proportions, even in his absence. He wanders, is captured by the religious fanatics behind the raid, escapes with the help of a disaffected raider named Asa with whom he becomes, perhaps, more than friends. “And Asa’s presence also affected the plains, which no longer were the oppressive immensity whose existence, for such a long time, had somehow been entrusted to Håkan’s lonely gaze.” But that association, too, ends and he lives for years as a hermit.
The reference in the foregoing quotation to the “oppressive immensity” of the plains matters. While landscapes are often important in books set in the West, sometimes becoming characters themselves, Diaz’s landscapes fail in the attempt. While familiar in kind, they are exaggerated beyond belief in degree. Håkan wanders for weeks, months, even years, through featureless expanses, never encountering any sign of civilization. But even in the isolated parts of the West it would be difficult, given the time and distance traveled, to avoid other human beings or signs of their presence, not to mention varied and changing terrain. The Old West was never as sterile or empty or nondescript as the author would have us believe. Nor would a wanderer as inept in learning the skills needed to survive, as Håkan seems to be (despite his Rube Goldberg-like attempts), last very long out there. Space does not allow recitation of the book’s numerous other departures from the realities of the Old West.
When the giant finally returns to civilization, he travels on a captured draft horse. Somehow, the size of the horse and Håkan’s now-advanced age must create an optical illusion, as no one seems to notice his immense size. “[H]e was far better known than he had ever imagined, and that, rather than muting his story, time had amplified it. His only consolation was that, despite his unwanted notoriety, nobody had recognized him. He was safe in his aged body.”
Back in California, Håkan stumbles onto vineyards and a winery and its tycoon owner, a thinly disguised version of Gustave Niebaum, who decides—in patronizing fashion—that Håkan belongs in Alaska and sends him there aboard one of his ships. And there the story will end, in a return to and continuation of the prologue that starts the story.