Wanderer of the Wasteland is a classic Western novel by Zane Grey from 1923. Adam Larey is a young, headstrong man who tends to act before he thinks. He’s looking to escape his former life -- his alcohol and gambling addict brother Guerd has stolen the love of his life -- and Adam has decided to move to Arizona and start fresh. He moves to a small mining town on the Colorado river to find work where he meets Margarita, a beautiful young woman who is clearly interested in him. Seeing a chance to forget his old troubles he begins to court her when, totally out of nowhere, Guerd reappears and starts to draw the attention of Margarita.
In a fit of rage, Adam and Guerd fight, resulting in Adam shooting Guerd. Realizing what he’s done, Adam flees into the night, pursued by the law.
This is where the real story begins: Wanderer of the Wasteland is not about Adam’s rip roaring adventures as one might imagine later Westerns to be, with gun fights and horse chases. Wanderer tells a deeper story of Adam being forced to deal with the solitude of his self-imposed exile. Trapped in the deepest, hottest desert in the United States, he must learn to survive. He meets and befriends old prospectors, local natives, and not much else. He spends years trapped in the desert, forever struggling with whether or not he deserves atonement for his crime.
Written well before the clichés and stereotypes of the Western genre fully developed, it’s an examination of what it takes for someone to cope with both physical hardships and mental isolation, whether our pasts define our futures, and if we can be redeemed for our worst crimes.
Wanderer of the Wasteland is nearly 100 years old and the writing style shows it. A lot of the language is archaic, written with stiff grammar and odd vocabulary choice, but this in no way harms the book. Grey was writing decades after the events of his stories, but for us we forget that even then it was historical fiction.
When we think of classic authors we tend to think of Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, or Charles Dickens. We might think of “Modern” classics like Virginia Woolf or F. Scott Fitzgerald. We forget genre authors as classics, and I think Zane Grey absolutely deserves to be placed in the pantheon of classic writers. These aren’t the pulp westerns you see on grocery store racks.
Steven McCreedy is a library technician at the Cambie Branch of the Richmond Public Library. The library’s Book Review Team is a diverse group of librarians and library technicians who each have unique reading interests and writing styles. The library’s book reviews provide interested readers with a sneak peek into the characters, the story and the most interesting elements of the book they have chosen to review.
