Wilderness: A Novel (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
This beautifully crafted debut novel chronicles the tragic and eventful life of Confederate soldier, Abel Truman. With chapters alternating between 1864 and 1899, Weller connects the days leading up to and through the bloody battle of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania with a turn of the century quest undertaken by a maimed and aging Abel. From a driftwood shack on the rugged Washington coast, Abel and his dog walk inland and across the Cascades to meet one final challenge which may or may not bring peace to the old campaigner. Many Civil War era novels since 1997 have been likened to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. Wilderness is one that certainly merrits the comparison. Weller's prose has its own sort of lyricism and clarity that will nonetheless remind readers of Frazier's or even Cormac McCarthy's style. Motivated more by end-of-life urges than the tug of heart and home, Abel Truman's journey is different from Inman's long walk, but this fine new book deserves to join such esteemed company.
— Chris
This beautifully crafted debut novel chronicles the tragic and eventful life of Confederate soldier, Abel Truman. With chapters alternating between 1864 and 1899, Weller connects the days leading up to and through the bloody battle of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania with a turn of the century quest undertaken by a maimed and aging Abel. From a driftwood shack on the rugged Washington coast, Abel and his dog walk inland and across the Cascades to meet one final challenge which may or may not bring peace to the old campaigner.Many Civil War era novels since 1997 have been likened to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. Wilderness is one that certainly merrits the comparison. Weller's prose has its own sort of lyricism and clarity that will nonetheless remind readers of Frazier's or even Cormac McCarthy's style. Motivated more by end-of-life urges than the tug of heart and home, Abel Truman's journey is different from Inman's long walk, but this fine new book deserves to join such esteemed company.
— From Chris WilcoxDescription
Thirty years after the Civil War's Battle of the Wilderness left him maimed, Abel Truman has found his way to the edge of the continent, the rugged, majestic coast of Washington State, where he lives alone in a driftwood shack with his beloved dog. Wilderness is the story of Abel, now an old and ailing man, and his heroic final journey over the snowbound Olympic Mountains. It's a quest he has little hope of completing but still must undertake to settle matters of the heart that predate even the horrors of the war.
As Abel makes his way into the foothills, the violence he endures at the hands of two thugs who are after his dog is crosscut with his memories of the horrors of the war, the friends he lost, and the savagery he took part in and witnessed. And yet, darkness is cut by light, especially in the people who have touched his life-from Jane Dao-Ming Poole, the daughter of murdered Chinese immigrants, to Hypatia, an escaped slave who nursed him back to life, and finally to the unbearable memory of the wife and child he lost as a young man. Haunted by tragedy, loss, and unspeakable brutality, Abel has somehow managed to hold on to his humanity, finding way stations of kindness along his tortured and ultimately redemptive path.
In its contrasts of light and dark, wild and tame, brutal and tender, and its attempts to reconcile a horrific war with the great evil it ended, Wilderness tells not only the moving tale of an unforgettable character, but a story about who we are as human beings, a people, and a nation. Lance Weller's immensely impressive debut immediately places him among our most talented writers.
About the Author
Lance Weller has published short fiction in several literary journals. He won Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A Washington native, he has hiked and camped extensively in the landscape he describes. He lives in Gig Harbor, WA, with his wife and several dogs.
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