Answer:
In the Distance, Hernán Diaz
This is a newer book than most of the rest on this list—it was only published last year—but it’s well on its way to becoming a classic. For one thing, it was a dark horse Pulitzer Prize finalist. For another, it’s wonderful, an update and subversion of the American Western that sees a young Swedish immigrant encountering good and very very bad in this strange American land, while on the hunt for his brother. “As a literary genre,” Diaz told The Paris Review, “the Western is a great riddle to me.
Because it whitewashes American history and offers a very attractive myth of the birth of this country, it should have become the national genre. Vigilantism, greed, racism, and plunder are all romanticized in the Western. There is a very American obsession with space and exploration, but in the end, nature tends to be debased to a mere source for the extraction of wealth. Also, the genre usually favors the individual over the law. And there is the gun fixation, of course. The list goes on. In short, even if the Western should have become our national genre, it has a marginal place in the literary canon. . . So I saw in the Western a slightly derelict genre that was ready to be taken over. And because of its ideological connotations, it seemed like hijacking the Western was a perfect way to say something new about the United States and its history.
Díaz was born in Argentina, and lived there and in Sweden as a child, in London in his twenties, and has lived in New York for the last twenty years.
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