The Lie at the Heart of the Western

Read: Americans are living in an alternate history

The protagonist of Hernán Diaz’s 2017 novel, In the Distance, for example, takes the opposite of a traditional hero’s journey; instead of trying to conquer Western land, he seeks to disappear into it. In Téa Obreht’s 2019, Inland, cowboys and outlaws are replaced by a camel driver, an exasperated mother, and visitors from the afterlife. And in How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang’s 2020 debut novel, a Chinese American prospector’s daughter forges her own path across California after her family is kicked off their claim.

These novels preserve some aspects of the old Westerns: the parched vistas, the isolation, the high-stakes emotion of characters running afoul of the law. But they also call into question the genre’s basic premise: the idea of the frontier as a place to be mastered and overcome. Instead, the Western becomes a way of thinking about humans’ relationship to land, the past, and the idea of home.

“If the Western is the expansion of America, I wanted to question who or what is American,” Zhang told me in an email. “If the Western is about nostalgia, I wanted to complicate that nostalgia through immigrant characters who simultaneously feel the tug of inherited nostalgia for another land.”

Indeed, the protagonists of recent revisionist Westerns are tugged not merely West to make their fortunes, but in more complex directions. In Diaz’s In the Distance, for example, a Swedish boy named Håkan tries to sail to New York with his brother, but gets on the wrong boat and ends up alone in San Francisco. His search for his brother leads him to travel against the flow of settlers; as Lawrence Downes wrote at The New York Times in 2018, he instead goes “west to east, around in circles, down into the earth, and north to Alaska.”

Håkan becomes an outlaw, but is the most unwilling of gunslingers; after he slaughters a band of thieves for assaulting the woman he loves, he is so consumed with shame that he lives largely as a hermit for decades, digging a warren of subterranean caves and sheltering inside them. Dressed in rags and eating only what he can trap or gather, he is completely absorbed by the work of maintaining his underground burrow. “He seldom considered his body or his circumstances—or anything else, for that matter,” Diaz writes. “The business of being took up all of his time.” Rather than conquering the West, in other words, Håkan becomes a part of it.

Téa Obreht’s Inland, too, offers a twist on the hero quest. Instead of a horse, Lurie Mattie rides a camel, his travels across the West inspired by the real-life United States Camel Corps. Like Håkan, Lurie is an immigrant; he arrived in the U.S. as a child from the Ottoman Empire. Unlike Håkan, he has an unusual gift, or curse: He can feel the desires of the dead. Obreht’s other protagonist, Nora, is an Arizona homesteader who is haunted, too—by the memory of Evelyn, her dead daughter, who still speaks to her. By the time Nora’s story intersects with Lurie’s, readers sense that neither will attain the standard Western hero’s goal of laying claim to the land.