Zane Grey’s take on Homer’s Odyssey turns up in Wanderer of the Wasteland, the story of a boy named Adam who flees his past and a terrible crime. Adam seeks refuge in the desert, where life is unrelentingly hard and every day brings a battle against the alkali sands, scorching heat, lonely nights, no-account highway men, and tempting yet treacherous women. It’s a coming-of-age tale and a landscape painting and an adventure story, as well as a romance novel and an existentialist inquiry into the nature of man’s solitude and unhappiness. And GOLD! Lots of GOLD!Nobody writes landscape better than Zane Grey. That makes sense given how much time and money he spent in the desert. The man knows the colors, the mountains, the various textures of sand, the cacti that sting, the flowers that bloom, the horny toads and eagles and condors and sheep. He paints word pictures, most of which translate successfully onto the page. He populates his desert with memorable characters, like Dismukes, a gold miner who toils in the canyons and furnace winds of the desert his whole life, working to save a half million dollars in gold dust, only to find that he is miserable anywhere else but the desert. His story is a tragedy, a cautionary fable about the hazards of too much work and not enough play. Or there is Jinny, a headstrong burro that Grey uses for comic relief. One amusing scene features Jinny getting into Adam’s dough, whereupon a chase ensues, wrecking the campsite, the man cursing the burro’s name as she gallops just out of reach, contentedly chewing his supper. Adam himself makes a pretty good everyman, though he sometimes vacillates between emotional extremes in ways more befitting a romance novel than a western. He is no gunslinger. He’s a boy on a quest to discover why the desert holds such fascination for men. What’s eerie about Adam is how, in his headlong rush to punish himself over the crime that sent him into the desert to begin with, he denies himself the usual earthly pleasures and attachments. He turns down money. He turns away from women. Whenever he lands in a settlement of any kind, he soon enough turns nomad. Adam is almost a Buddhist in his ability to float above his appetites. I suspect that, sooner or later, every reader will lose patience with Adam’s hand-wringing, or stop believing in his purity. But if Adam’s soul is an almost lily-white shade of gray, Zane Grey’s soul is darker. Certainly these pages are dripping with "ejaculate." That word turns out, in fact, to be one of Grey’s favorite dialogue tags, as in “‘Huh!’ ejaculated the man, stupidly,” or “‘Ho! Ho! if thet durned injun I beat didn’t crawl way down hyar! An’ his brains oozin’ out!’ he ejaculated, hoarsely.” Adam and Dismukes ejaculate throughout the novel. Eventually even a fourteen year old girl ejaculates, and the most suggestive example of this trend by far is delivered by a ranch widow: “‘No wonder Gene spilled the milk!’ ejaculated Mrs. Blair.” This quirk appeals greatly to the juvenile boy who lives inside me. At first I thought that was just how early twentieth century writers wrote the word “exclaimed,” but then I ran across that verb in this selfsame novel. Clearly Grey knows how to exclaim, but he prefers to ejaculate.All in all this is a fine book. Besides several gorgeous descriptions of the desert, it reaches some interesting conclusions about humanity’s fascination with death, loneliness, and the sublime reaches of both the natural world and the human soul. Unfortunately, Grey’s reach sometimes exceeds his grasp, and wherever it does his language falls short of his ideas. Several times Adam sits alone on a desert mountain overlooking a sandy, purple sunset, and he plumbs the depths of his own desires, and the writing slips into abstractions that contrast poorly with the concrete language describing the desert. These sections quickly become difficult to follow, and I often found myself wishing Grey could have swapped in a spiritual writer of greater literary power, maybe Dostoevsky or, in a more compact vein, Chekhov. If Annie Dillard could have ghost written those meditations, this novel would have deserved a place in the American canon as an epic, alongside Moby Dick or Huckleberry Fin. But Grey wrote at his best when he stayed lower to the ground, in the hills and canyons, the sand and spit, the burros and lizards and scorching sun of the landscape he loved most. I’m glad I read this novel, but I don’t think I’ll be going back for more of Grey’s ejaculations.
This is at least the third time I've read this book, which is one of Zane Grey's lesser-known (not to say unknown) works. The simple story is that youthful Adam Larey flees into the Arizona desert after a violent and apparently fatal confrontation with his brother, and spends years there mastering the elements and attempting to atone for his crime in various ways. The descriptions of the desert, and the people he encounters there, are fascinating and graphic. There are scenes of great beauty and of horror. I found particularly compelling Grey's treatment of his female characters, and Larey's relations with them; this may be one of the earliest examples of feminist writing by a male writer--particularly from an author known for his action novels. Dismukes, a prospector who befriends Larey, is one of the great characters in western literature (and incidentally has one of the great names in the genre, as well).
Do You like book Wanderer Of The Wasteland (2005)?
My father had this book when I was growing up. Last summer I ran across it at my brother's house and decided to read it (1924 edition). The characters and basic plot line are interesting, but the main thrust of the book is almost unending descriptions of the beauty, silence and ruggedness of the desert itself, becoming almost existentially philosophical (translation: BORING after two or three of these passages). Nonetheless, I was smitten by the overall impression, and when I found out that there is a sequel, "Stairs of Sand," I decided to purchase it on ebay (original 1929 edition), this is my next book to read after "Twilight" which I've almost finished.
—Tim
Usually a fan of Zane Grey, but this was a complete waste of time. I'm gonna save you the trouble of having to read it, and just give away the whole plot right here- Two brothers feuding over their inheritance and a girl get into a bar fight. One of them gets shot and the other, grief stricken over what's happened and worried he'll get hung for murder, runs away into the desert. Since he refuses to become a prospector like everyone else in the desert, he just wanders around and almost-dies like
—Colleen Frakes
