It may be all invented but remains true

Because I read and thoroughly enjoyed Hernan Diaz's novel Trust, I picked up and read his first novel In the Distance. It has an interesting publishing history.

It was published in 2017 by Coffee House Press, the well-respected, non-profit, independent, Minneapolis publisher. The press had held an open call for manuscripts and Diaz submitted his the book. He is associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University, where he edits the journal Revista Hispánica Moderna and his previous book had been a study of Jorge Luis Borges, Borges, Between History and Eternity. He grew up in Argentina and Sweden, studied in London and New York, and lives in Brooklyn. 

In the Distance was headed for a modest, respectable—but not best-seller—history until it was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which dramatically changed sales projections. Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, published its own paperback edition in March 2024 and hardback six months later.

A New York Times story about the novel begins: “Håkan Söderström, the hulking hero of Hernán Diaz’s novel, makes a stupendous entrance, ascending onto the first page through a star-shaped void on a featureless plain of white sea ice. Longhaired, white-bearded, gnarled and naked, he pulls himself onto the floe and walks on bow legs to an icebound schooner, carrying a rifle and ax. We are somewhere, nowhere, in the frozen north."

The book evokes Håkan's life as he grows from childhood in Sweden to adulthood on the American western desert between the Gold Rush and the Civil War. "Though many of its elements are familiar to the point of being worn out — saloons and wagon trains, Indians and gold prospectors — the novel is not. Mr. Diaz’s long study of North American literature, much of it steeped in the 19th century, allowed him to expertly plunder an antique genre for parts. The rebuilt mechanism is his own design, and it moves in unexpected directions: west to east, around in circles, down into the earth, and north to Alaska.”

Although Håkan is alone for pages at a time, he travels with and is influenced by an obsessed gold prospector, a scientist looking to prove life rose spontaneously in brine pools, an unexpected good man in a criminal gang who loves to cook, a whore who does not have a heart of gold, an Indian band that his been butchered by whites. He is able to stay alive and ultimately thrive.

One reason (of many) I enjoyed In the Distance thoroughly is because I've spent time hiking in areas in which Håkan traveled: Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico. I could identify real places—the Great Salt Lake, the San Juan River canyon, Grand Gulch—and events—the Mountain Meadows Massacre and more. Because this is not history and we are seeing places and learning of events through Håkan's consciousness these are also hazy.

They are also invented. Diaz never been out west, never hiked the back country or through the desert. “There was something that to me felt corrupt and dishonest about having an air-conditioned experience of the protagonist’s ordeals,” he said. “I defend the idea of reading over researching, which has this whole protocol that I don’t think applies to literature, which has its own relationship to truth.”

In the Distance may be all invented but it rings true.