Key themes
- The Western as a form — and what happens when the hero has no language
- Size and solitude as conditions of the American frontier
- The outsider who never belongs — and who survives precisely because of it
About this book
A young Swedish boy travels from his homeland to the American West but ends up in California instead of New York, and spends decades moving east through the frontier, searching for his brother. Diaz's debut is a spare, elegant deconstruction of the Western, told by a giant of a man who is always the outsider everywhere he goes.
Published in 2017, In the Distance was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Diaz drew on Western genre conventions and their contradictions to examine what the American frontier mythology conceals.
Discussion questions
- Håkan is a giant Swede who cannot speak English and cannot find his brother. How does Diaz use this radical foreignness — and what does an outsider perspective reveal about America that an insider view cannot?
- The novel systematically deconstructs the Western genre. What specifically does it subvert — the lone hero, the frontier promise, the violence as adventure — and what remains after the subversion?
- Håkan's relationship to violence is complex — he commits terrible acts and is horrified by them. How does Diaz develop this ethical ambiguity?
- The novel is sparse and stylised. How does Diaz's prose serve the subject — and what does the formal economy say about the world it describes?
- In the Distance was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. What does it do that earns serious literary recognition — and how does it differ from Diaz's subsequent Pulitzer winner, Trust?
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