Into the wild
There’s something primal in the notion that we can pack it all in and vanish from our own lives, that we can trade in the discontents of our civilization for the call of something wilder. But can we really? And can we afford the cost?
The prodigiously talented Dave Eggers, in his funny, moving new novel, “Heroes of the Frontier,” introduces us to Josie, a single mom crippled with losses who takes her two young kids on a journey through the Alaskan wilderness in hopes of escaping her ex and perhaps finding a better way to live.
Josie, a wonderful Eggers creation, is really the main reason to read the novel. She’s a person full of regrets and neurotic tics, a dentist haunted by the death of Jeremy, a young patient, who, despite her urging to go into the Peace Corps, chose Afghanistan instead, and died. She’s also a onetime emancipated minor (her parents, both nurses in a psych hospital, became derailed when four patients killed themselves on their watch), and she’s still looking for freedom.
She’s been sued by a patient who swears Josie was negligent in not seeing the beginnings of a mouth cancer. Because Josie has no real money saved up, and is in debt, she’s forced to do a trade — her dental practice for a dropped lawsuit. Josie’s also rid of the father of her kids, Carl, which is actually a relief, as he had little or no interests in the kids or her.
But when Carl suddenly announces that he is remarrying and his wife-tobe’s family want to spend time with her kids in Florida, Josie panics, sure he is going to want more custody. She packs her kids up in a broken-down RV, hilariously called the Chateau, and heads north to Alaska, sometimes reading entries from a book they find called “Trails Grown Dim,” a series of longing pleas from people searching for relatives or friends whom they’ve lost track of.
As the group heads deeper into nature, Eggers’ writing becomes rapturous. There is, of course, the sublime beauty of nature: The river moves “like a thousand silver knives,” there are slithering snakes, the heated air, encroached by fire and firefighters as they move further into “the barbarian heart” of the country, where there is still a symphony of gunshots and sirens.
But Eggers balances the grandeur of nature with the baser senses, too — the smells of the van’s backedup toilet, of feces left in a campground, the sourness of not being able to shower, and the fear and rage Josie feels in her encounters with a variety of unsavory men.
But gradually, in their journey, a sense of sameness begins to creep in. Josie keeps arriving at someplace new with the kids, but it always seems a little like the place they just left. The kids keep experiencing nature, seeing bears, moving through forests, staying ahead of the encroaching wildfires. But because one adventure doesn’t really build on another, the narrative drive seems positioned in low gear.
Also, although Josie is complex and easy to love, her kids don’t feel as fully formed as they should be. Paul, the older brother, makes up fantastical stories to comfort his sister, Anna, like telling her the sky is made of birds who watch over them, but we never really see deep enough into their interiors to know how they are changing and what they think about those changes. They don’t cast enough shadow.
Part of the problem, too, is that there’s nothing really at stake. The lawsuit that was plaguing her is already settled, so why does she imagine legal process servers are stalking her? She’s sure Carl is going to furiously come after her, but there’s nothing in her past descriptions of him to indicate that he would. What is she really running from and looking for, and what is stopping her from finding it?
Gradually, Josie and her kids begin to be an actual part of nature. Or at least, that is how Josie sees it, but sometimes her language is so grandiose, you can’t help but wonder if Eggers is winking at you. She hears musicians and thinks that “she’d just heard something absolute in its power to justify her life,” but the players shake her off, telling her they’re just fooling around.
“Wasn’t she on the verge of some great discovery? she muses — “if not one meant for the world, at least a private revelation, bringing forth the music within her?” Josie marvels at how she sees her kids becoming one with the land. Paul stops being afraid of the dark. Anna watches a deer in awe. She’s sure they are better now than they were in Ohio despite their not being in school.
At the end, these wanderers want “more challenge, more conquest, more glory.” But Josie isn’t settled in the here and now. She’s looking for the next day, and is this really better than the way she was living before? Or is it just different? In the abrupt end, Eggers stops us short, giving us a shaggy dog story that starts to give you its paw and then seems to think the better of it.
Josie and her kids begin to be an actual part of nature. Or at least, that is how Josie sees it, but sometimes her language is so grandiose, you can’t help but wonder if Eggers is winking at you.