Magnificent, Masterful, Stunning: I remember reading the praise on the front of Wilderness. I also remember finishing it and thinking that it lived up to every bit of it.
Our bookstore friend and author Jeffrey Lent is responsible for some of the praise. Jeffrey, author of In the Fall, Lost Nation, A Peculiar Grace and After You’ve Gone, shares his thoughts on Lance Weller’s Wilderness.
After reading a bound manuscript copy of Wilderness, I used the word ‘magnificent’ to describe it. But in the several months that have passed since that reading, another more potent word has come to mind. Majestic. Majesty settles over this novel following patient but inevitable contemplation. Such meditations aren’t thrust upon you, it’s simply part of the novel’s stark beauty that returns to your mind over and over. Unbidden, scenes flash in memory, narrative threads tangle and clarify, only to re-tangle again, as other clarities press in. And it occurs to you that you have been changed, perhaps profoundly so, by reading this lovely, heartbreaking novel.
The usual places in print and electronic media will soon enough fill up with myriad plot descriptions and analyses debating textual choices and Lance Weller’s prose. Such is the nature of modern life. I’d interject only to offer a quote from Thoreau: A critic is a navigator who has never sailed from sight of land. And Weller takes us out onto wild and choppy seas with the calm assurance of one who has charted a careful thoughtful course and then masterfully pilots us through the voyage.
For this is a novel of a voyage; of several journeys that ultimately become the single journey of a lifetime. Of an old man, who many years after losing the war in the battle that gives the novel its name, sets out from the coast of Washington to make his way east over the winter mountains, on a quest he suspects he’ll fail at but must nevertheless attempt, to the much younger man who found his way from his home in upstate New York to a life in the south, where, even before the dreadfulness of the war descends, has been visited by the depths of horror in the destruction of a daughter, and then his wife. With the war, he fights because he must, and learns also that he can; the warrior emerges. In the most terrible of ways, the war restores his humanity, and then strips it away again, from comrades standing and fallen, from the slaves who save his life but at the cost of their own, from the wounds he sustains, and that remain, daily, during his long years of self-exile on the north Pacific coast, where in the weeks we travel with him he takes one last stab at life. It stabs back. Hard. This is not a man who is healed, he simply hasn’t yet died.
In the end Lance Weller has given us not simply another Civil War novel but a deeply and profoundly American novel. In the years after that conflict the country was filled up with tens of thousands of broken men, with rudimentary prostheses, or none at all. Look at the photographs of those veterans in old age, at the hard staring eyes, and know it’s not the camera, the photographer, their glare lies upon. Consider our own grandfathers and fathers, veterans of the First and Second World Wars, of Korea. Of the heartbreak that was Vietnam, a war that divided and broke the nation in ways not seen since the Civil War, and that I’m far from alone in thinking led in ways both dire and stunningly obscene to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And of the years that now lie ahead for those damaged service men and women, our sisters, brothers, children, neighbors.
It is them, finally, all of them, that inhabit Wilderness.
And yes, the man, while struggling with humanity, does maintain an ongoing link with love, creation, and life, through the shared devotion and dependence with dogs, from the war to the mountain trek at the end of his life. I hesitate to belabor a point but can’t help but be reminded of the strong bonds between our present military personnel and their service animals- see the Wounded Warrior Project website or related ones.
I know I intimated I’d leave comments about Lance Weller’s prose to all those who’ll otherwise chime in, but can’t let myself sign off without a comment of my own. Weller writes a graceful seemingly effortless but lyric and thoughtful line. Followed by another and yet another. In his hands the ordinary appears extraordinary, the extraordinary nothing beyond what is called for. A stylist of the highest mark, bringing subtle but tactile delight to the page, to the work entire. And thus, rarely but time to time, we’re offered a gift. With Wilderness, you face such a moment.
Reach out your hands and take it up.
-Jeffrey Lent
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Lance Weller will be signing and reading at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 5th at 5:00 and 5:30.
Wilderness our September selection for First Editions Club and is published by Bloomsbury We’ll have signed copies available for $25.
Click here for another take on Wilderness.
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