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Views and Reviews: Barbara Knott

IN WILDERNESS

Spun, Woven, Braided Blended, Cooked, Seasoned

by DIANE THOMAS

In that long afternoon soon after my copy of In Wilderness arrived in the mail, I could have read the whole book of 300 pages, so quick was the pacing, but it occurred to me about halfway through that I needed some time to reflect and gather myself for what was to come. And so I paused, and in the next sitting, the next day, I read on to the end. If you haven't read the book yet, prepare to have your dreams stirred, your securities shaken, your perspectives altered.

There is no formula - no formula can contain what we have here. If you have any literary bones in you, you will be thrilled again and again by the book's language and craft, and if you have any interest in the survival of our species, you may appreciate thematic elements threaded into this mystery/thriller/romance, this novel that finally has to be weighed as literary rather than genre fiction. You may be, as I was, startled into recognition, as if for the first time, of increasingly dangerous conditions undermining the urban world we humans have shaped from a wilderness that diminishes faster than we can comprehend.

Take the context in which the story is woven: the late 1960s, Atlanta and the South, urban life dominated by advertising and the corporate bottom line, individual lives lived largely out of touch with nature, in which people searching for some sense of cosmic proportion refresh themselves by making short trips to the mountains or ocean. That kind of tourism had spawned a surge of interest in creating resort places out of large tracts of wilderness, particularly in the less developed mountain regions. The U. S. is engaged in a war raging in faraway Vietnam, one that like all wars wastes innumerable young soldiers by death, maiming, and the devastation of what was then still called battle fatigue (a name assigned in WWII to replace the "shell shock" of WWI). Subsequent wars brought a more formal designation of the illness as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that figures into the fate of the leading male character.

Take the characters: Katherine Reid, age 38, co-owner with her husband of an advertising agency, who suffers a miscarriage, apparently from inhalation of chemicals sprayed on a pest-infested ginko tree outside her house (in other words, by atmospheric poisoning). Her marriage unravels and her husband departs, leaving her the controlling interest in the agency she has helped to build by creating alluring ads for business clients based on the Rule of Three, exemplified in lines many of us remember, like the cigarette ad that promises less tar, less nicotine, same great taste.

Soon thereafter Katherine is confronted with the awful news that she herself is dying of another as yet unnamed illness that has since been identified as EI (environmental illness), also known as MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity), and that she has less than six months to live. She spots a newspaper notice that she can't resist, perhaps out of an intuition that her only creative possibility is to detach from the world as she has known it and try to control when and how she dies by disappearing into wilderness with a gun and six bullets. She buys, without even looking at it, a small cabin on a wooded tract of land in the North Georgia mountains and goes there, taking with her minimum luggage from her urban life.

Three hours north of the city is a private wilderness preserve adjacent to a national forest. That is Katherine's destination and the place where she will meet her male counterpart in the story: hidden in that wilderness is a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, holing up in a partially ruined mansion that he learned about from his best friend while they were in Vietnam. One imagines that 20-year-old Danny MacLean retreated out of an instinct to preserve what sanity he had left on returning from the war and the appalling experience of having had his best friend explode so close to him that a bone fragment struck and became embedded in Danny's leg while brains spewed onto his face.

The plot line of this story, the romance, comes from a crossing of paths in which these two live their way into a relationship with each other and the wilderness. It is not your traditional romance with familiar rituals of courtship. Their meeting and mating is frightening, largely because each of them is uprooted from the familiar and the comfortable, and both are wounded from the toxicity of the worlds they have come from. Their connection is experimental, full of tentative reaching out and recoiling with nausea and fear of each other that eventually turns into obsession.

Two images that dominate the structure of the novel are weaving and cooking. The author herself can be seen as spinner (of the tale), weaver (of plotlines, thematic motifs, images) and alchemist/cook (distilling images). In the story, there is a quiet suggestion of Danny's relation to Odysseus and Katherine's to Penelope, a mythic couple who carry traits of warrior and weaver. Here, Danny is a warrior/killer and Katherine is a weaver of wall hangings in which she tries to capture her changing life, learning in the process what Goethe calls "the innermost weave of the world." They are both immersed in cooking: she of herbs and grains and vegetables and he of small animals.

The setting also contains a symbolic juxtaposition in the housing: Katherine displaces Danny in the rude cabin, and Danny then inhabits the ruined mansion nearby, the "Gatsby house" that holds a vast library of books, the only cultural inheritance that he embraces, except for the cannabis that his friend, who told him about the house, had hidden there before he perished in the war. Plotwise, we have Danny moving back and forth between the two dwellings, working his way into the life of a person he calls the Dead Lady because he could smell death on her when she walked into the wilderness.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this storyteller's art is in the way Diane Thomas handles point of view. She changes her perspectives in the most nuanced way, slipping seamlessly from the psyche of Katherine into the psyche of Danny, back and forth, with views, vocabulary, and awareness so fluidly changing that you're hardly aware of a narrator at all. Her style pulls the reader immediately into the "vivid and continuous dream" that John Gardner saw as the heart of the art of fiction. Through this mastery, the book becomes a marvel to read.

In Wilderness speaks to the need of humans to get out of the trap of urban and suburban life dominated by greed and cynicism, alienation and lackluster life, and into connection with an ecosystem that includes human/animal meanings and a sense of kinship with all life. I began by suggesting that readers should prepare to have their dreams stirred on reading In Wilderness. The experience stimulated in me a night dream of cleaning up space around my house, working with an abundance of loose soil to sculpt a landscape, and of animals arriving. I welcomed these animating forces both in the dream and in my morning thoughts about it.

The high praise of initial reviews rightly concentrates on the craft with which In Wilderness is written, and craft is what held my eyes to the page as well. Still, I think people who pick up the book expecting it to be "a romance" may find themselves shocked at the psychological nakedness and high level of stress in the novel, and that readers expecting "a thriller" may be pulled against their will into deeper waters. Diane Thomas offers under-the-skin writing, both visceral and psychic.

Her book reminds one of Henry David Thoreau's statement about going to Walden Pond: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. We can see that in mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau was already picking up the threads that Diane Thomas would be weaving in the late twentieth century America. Her book title is also suggestive of another line from Thoreau: in Wildness is the preservation of the World.

The reader may not come across a more deftly rendered modern version of what Thoreau called living deliberately than can be found in this book.

COMMENTARY ON DIANE THOMAS' IN WILDERNESS

If you have not read the book, I suggest that you read it and the review and then come back to this commentary. My purpose here is to amplify further some of the themes and motifs in the novel.

Diane Thomas' In Wilderness returns us to the perennial questions Why are we here? How shall we live? Thomas creates a literary indictment of a world in which the main medium of exchange is consumerism and where there is less and less meaningful connection to self, others, and the world. She lays out the conditions we lived in five decades ago and continue to live in, largely separated from nature and its vitality, with alarming intensification of environmental pollution and destruction of natural habitats.

The distance between the time setting of the novel and now is not great: since the 1960s, wars have broadened out to include years of distress in Afghanistan and Iraq, with a long queue of other hot spots where, in awkward and unsatisfactory negotiations, a military solution remains inevitably "on the table" along with our daily bread. Life outside the war zones continues to be dominated by advertisement and commerce to such a degree that anyone who spends time on the Internet (that would be all but the eldest and youngest of us) is forced, when trying to read anything longer than a headline, to play kickass with popup ads that render reading a torture rather than a pleasure, until someone finally points out that you can turn on your popup blocker and let the barrage of advertisements quiet down, at least. How good to have this modicum of control! But even now, in the midst of my pleasure in rediscovering the music channels on my television set, where I can choose to listen to a Mozart horn concerto while I daydream with my dog, I have only to glance at the screen, a moment ago so beautifully backdropped with a shining horn and sheet of music, to see a still shot squeezed in between instrument and music, an advertisement for pain relief! We need pain relief, all right.

If I lacked a ready example of toxicity in our environment, one passed - virtually, of course - before my eyes and ears on the televised evening news of July 2, 2015: near Maryville, Tennessee, a CSX train headed to South Georgia derailed and poured into the mountain atmosphere a huge helping of hazardous materials meant for use in making plastic.

Back in April of this year the news floated across our ubiquitous screens of a tourist disaster in St. John, Virgin Islands, where a family on vacation at Sirenusa condominiums got dangerously sick after exposure to a pesticide. Their unit had been fumigated using a gas containing the highly toxic methyl bromide in an effort to get rid of powder post beetles. The chemical is also used to destroy ants and roaches, and though it is said to be illegal for use in this country, there are many variations of poisonous substance that are not. Such toxins are used all over the world with little if any regulation by governments that would bargain environmental safety for greed and consumption. The other main use of the word consumption, if anyone has forgotten, refers to a deadly disease (tuberculosis) in which breathing is compromised. In a way, In Wilderness is about breathing. Our word for soul, psyche, comes from the Greek word psykhe, which also means "to breathe." We live by healthy breathing and by circulation of healthy blood through our bodies.

On the subject of blood, Bill Moyers, one of our most respected journalists, produced a documentary in 2001 called Trade Secrets, described on his website as "A two-hour special report on how chemical companies have collaborated to keep from American workers and the American public the full truth about the impact of chemicals on health and safety." In it, he presents the results of his own blood test where 84 out of 150 toxins researched were present in his own bloodstream.

There is no question that we now live in a poisonous atmosphere with toxins in our bodies, more and more news of cancers and other diseases in ourselves or those close to us, with unhealthy and disordered feeding habits, under enormous stress of various kinds, from too much noise and light, to technological dependencies, to financial anxieties, to increasingly dangerous behavior carried out by desperate people with easy access to guns.

Reading In Wilderness creates in us a longing for a vision of what a new world might be like. Will we continue in our chemically and psychologically toxic environment to wring our hands and say, Woe are we? An alternative is to dismantle the fixed idea that we must go on paying attention at all costs to the business world's bottom line, warring and destroying, depleting and throwing away our resources, losing connection after connection to the vital world, becoming not autonomous but automatonous as we nervously glance at our watches, review our messages, check our email, our Facebook pages, and pause occasionally to film an event that we cannot then experience in its full-bodied happening.

In the novel, by moving from the city fraught with malignant spirits to the mountains where she can breathe more fully and freely, Katherine takes action against loss of soul, a metaphor used by pre-industrial cultures to describe a condition experienced collectively when, as Jungian psychologist James Hollis puts it, "consciousness is enervated and [one is] at the mercy of fads, fashions, and malignant spirits" (Active Imagination, 76). The fads and fashions were also part of Katherine's urban life, and Danny has been driven to the mountains by PTSD, which surely qualifies as a malignant spirit. Hollis goes on, ". . . the reintegration of such energies, whether through the traditional powers of the shamans, tribal mythologies, the work of psychoanalysis, or the inexplicable grace of consciousness, makes the split-off energies available to ego once more and one feels a sense of well-being." This story is one of suffering and dismemberment (the coming apart of an old life orientation) and the gradual move toward reintegration.

Danny's character offers powerful images of dismemberment. He arrives in the mountains carrying a piece of his dead best friend's leg bone in his own thigh, a souvenir of his time in Vietnam. He is so immersed in the experience of death that he smells death on Katherine when he discovers she is occupying the quarters he had thought his own, forcing him to live in the ruined mansion nearby. He makes daily excursions to the cabin to watch her and, with stalking skills he picked up in Vietnam, moves in so close at night that she can hear him breathe through a cranny in the wall near which she has placed her sleeping bag. She imagines she is hearing a deer. Long before they meet face to face, he has named her Dead Lady. When they finally talk, Danny tells her of his experience in Vietnam.

Over there you're in the death business. There's death everywhere and you can't get away. Some poor shits got to bring the bodies in for counting, load them on the trucks, fly them in the copters. Sometimes there's not body bags enough. You steel yourself to not look and then you look anyway. The dead reach out to you and make you stare. It's their last act with the living . . . . That's why I live in the woods. I got so much death in me there's times it takes over my mind.

Danny's reference to why I live in the woods is an echo of Thoreau's statement about his reasons for withdrawing to Walden Pond.

Katherine's main symptom of the death that was supposed to come, her inability to assimilate food, goes away after some time in the wild. Then, perhaps as a warning, whenever she leaves the cabin to get supplies in the nearest town, she retches as soon as she gets beyond the little grocery, the price she pays for venturing outside the wilderness. She and Danny have difficulty eating together, for her diet excludes meat and his requires (almost) only meat.

Fear and nausea co-exist in these characters with a third presence called Death. Katherine's womb has expelled a dead child, and she now is carrying the death sentence meted out by her doctor. She settles into her new space with this reflection, given by the narrator: By electing not to shoot herself this morning, she can spend the whole day living here. That introduces the motif of living in the presence of death as a way of intensifying the life experience.

Nausea is compensated by the nurturing of the wilderness itself: Eventually, On the turnoff road, she hears all the birds and names them from their calls, listens to the distant thunder, the light wind ruffling the trees, sees tones and textures all around her, in the dirt beneath her feet. Her life, even alone, is rich and good. She is herself once more. Thus, Katherine momentarily finds herself and knows she is on the right track.

Danny and Katherine wait deep in the ancient Appalachian forest, as in the forest of fairy tales where, time out of mind, one is led to travel deep and wait, and where one may find a wise woman or man who may lead one to a healing plant that will prevent or cure an illness. They both become, in fact, heathens (meaning "of the heath," uncultivated land, wilderness). So we have here a wounded woman and a more severely wounded man. What vision can take them forward separately or together? None, until there is recognition, remembering, atonement.

Metaphorically, Katherine nurtures Danny by her presence and her willingness to let him into her life when he asks, and to unbraid her hair when he chants his need. His "asking" has the intensity of a demand, and her compliance may create discomfort in the reader, who may appropriately wonder where these gestures are leading. Still, he comforts her by his presence, his breathing with her, his tenderness in holding her and his desire to be held sometimes like a baby. Their eroticism is colored by severe psychological unsteadiness and disorder: a dance of two people engaged in a struggle of power over each other that makes it (probably) impossible to create a life together, but they are determined to try their hands and hearts and minds in these extreme circumstances.

In the end, we are not sure what the experience has meant to Danny, who sums up his thought with the line, It's. All. Right. Perhaps that's the best anyone who has lived such a life can say, and it is far richer in his case than it's all wrong. Katherine's experience is different. She, in some ways, has followed it's all wrong as a mantra (referring to the world she lives in) until she reaches some of what she wanted in atonement.

Through Katherine, Diane Thomas shows us why keeping death close allows us to live more fully. At the end, Katherine walks away from her cabin and risks losing herself in wilderness without any signs to guide her home. Katherine's quest gives her a vision of return, in this case to her garden in which she can now hold both a strong sense of individual location and of kinship with all life. What leads her back is sound, experienced as "many voices": She advances with slow, measured steps toward the sound, which is beautiful. Then she stops. For it now comes from all around her, from rocks, leaves, trees, from fallen branches, jagged boulders, whitened bones, small flowers beneath her feet. From other living and dead things she cannot see, their individual notes distinct, each one, in tone and pitch. Yet joined, an exaltation. I feel the lift of that word exaltation, and I imagine Katherine living a solitary quiet life, passing along to her daughter, born of her imperfect but vital relationship with Danny, the possibility of exaltation.

Many insightful nonfiction books have been written on the motifs I've touched on here, a few of them just before Thomas began writing her book around 30 years ago, and some since then (see the selected list below), all of which are well written and valuable for helping us to understand our existential dilemma. Yet nonfiction writing, no matter how creative, lacks the power of a long, continuous story, the narrative dream that John Gardner locates in fiction, to move us, to stir our dreams, to force us out of our complacency.

In Wilderness goes from a story of alienation to a story of kinship, from isolation to belonging. It entails great sacrifice: of the woman's dead child and her own near death, as well as the death of her male counterpart, whose destiny echoes that of "Danny Boy" in the sad Irish song. It involves the awakening of wonder in the story's pair of lovers as they search, discover, frighten, humiliate, yield, and learn from each other . . . shyly, awkwardly, messily, generously and, in some strange way, triumphantly.

One triumph is the pregnancy that delivers their child; another is the companionship of mother and child described in the Epilogue. These have to be weighed against the loss, most importantly of Danny. I miss him and his way of expressing himself, rendered so fully by the narrator from inside his unspoken awareness rather than in first person or third person, over his shoulder. This point of view is one that I don't recall encountering before. I've learned that it's called "third person close" (sometimes "third person intimate"). The effect is to bring the reader as close to the characters as possible without completely sacrificing the eagle's eye perspective.

Having looked at Diane Thomas' novel through several lenses, my conclusion is that the book asks many important questions and leaves it to her readers to start conversations within ourselves and with others about what she has done in this book where the dead reach out to you and make you stare. The staring is self-reflective and may stir pain and discomfort as you catch yourself mesmerized by moves you think perhaps wrongly that you wouldn't make yourself. Else why do they seem so familiar in some remote part of our consciousness? And what about our dependence on comfort, our love of possessions, our addiction to advertisement, commerce, and technology? Where in all of this voluntary imprisonment is the authentic voice of self expression? How do we release that? That's what this novel is all about.

Recommended Viewing:

Here is a video clip from Bill Moyers' documentary Trade Secrets in which he gets his own blood tested and finds he has 84 out of the 150 toxins being tested for. He discusses that with the doctor doing research.

Bill Moyers Moment

Follow this link to Jonathan Knott's review of Diane Thomas' first novel The Year the Music Changed in The Grapevine, Issue 5: