WHAT CAME WEST

In this stream-of-consciousness wilderness saga set in the 1840s, on the eve of the California Gold Rush, a reclusive trapper rejected by society fights for survival on a westward trek filled with treacherous encounters.

As a child, Silas Hall is the bane of his Pennsylvania family’s existence. He is prone to tantrums, acts of destruction, and prolonged escapes into the woods—behavior that gets him dosed with laudanum. As a young adult, he fathers a baby with his mother’s nonverbal housekeeper. But overwhelmed by the demands of intimacy, he abandons them, making the wild his permanent home, as he says, "so I might live in a world that could hold me." Heading across muddy and jagged terrain with a mule and a musket, he comes across dead bodies and avoids becoming one of them by committing his own killings. Setting foot on Sierra Nevada soil, where few white men have dared go before, he periodically visits a Nisenan chief, No Rope, whose friendship he has earned by helping in the fight against white antagonists who, in due course, will eradicate entire Native populations in pursuit of gold. Another tribe isn’t so friendly to Silas, wounding and taking him captive and, in a super-tense scene, threatening to deal him the gruesome fate visited upon the men he had hooked up with. Alternating between third-person narration and remorseful letters from Silas to his son, the novel boasts powerful natural images, such as a massive flock of passenger pigeons that blackens the sky at a dark moment in young Silas’ life. An exhaustive and sometimes exhausting book written under the influence of Cormac McCarthy and perhaps James Joyce, Weil’s follow-up to The Age of Perpetual Light (2017) is as much about sounds and smells and distant visions as it is about human action. The great tragedy of Silas’ life remains his father’s cutting-down of the elm tree that once called out to him through his bedroom window.

A powerful novel, rich in language and dark intensity.