I loved Wilderness. It’s a novel about Abel Truman, a man who happened to fight in the Civil War, a man who is certainly trying to sort out his life as an older man. Wilderness makes me think about other exceptional writers like Wallace Stegner. Why do I think of Stegner? Because Stegner’s writing gets at the core of what makes us human and Wilderness gets right to the core as you journey with Abel Truman. I took the time to read the introduction Stegner wrote for the Franklin Library Edition of Crossing to Safety. Below are Stegner’s words and you’ll find Weller’s words in the video.
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Beginning a novel, William Styron has said, is like setting out to walk from Vladivostok to Spain on your knees. And, he should have added, blindfolded. For there is more than an apparently endless and agonizing duration involved. There is also, very often, a demoralizing uncertainty of direction.
Some novels go from situation through complication to resolution in a straight, planned line, and discover the answers that their authors previously planted there. Others feel their way from darkness toward light, from confusion toward clarification, trying not to manipulate or stack or artificially organize reality in the process. Crossing to Safety sounds like one that knows where it is going, and by the end, perhaps, it does. But during its direction its had no such certainty. It was a search, not a directed journey; and what is the end, it is no Blackbeard’s treasure of revelation, but something fragile–hardly more than a confirmation of feeling.
Feeling is of the essence. I knew from the beginning that this was to be a novel about friendship, and all the ambiguities implicit in that freest and noblest of human relations.
. . .
If the progress of this novel has been from Vladivostok to Spain, the route has through Rio, Fairbanks, and Adelaide. Actually, it has been more like the progress of a rain drop that falls on the Bearpaw Mountains, say, in Montana, and must find its way to the Gulf of Mexico by any nameless coulee that will lead it to the Milk River, from which it can flow on down into the Missouri and the Mississippi until the world flattens out and the necessity to flow is over.
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A conversation with Lance Weller speaking from the shoreline of Washington State where part of Wilderness takes place. Like Stegner explains, Weller explains that he did not have “any particular theme or agenda.” Listen in.
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