Wanderer Of The Wasteland – Zane Grey, 1923 ★½

Lost in the Desert

Just as the American West proved a land of reinvention for generations of European migrants, so would it be for many Western authors. Of all the fiction writers who focused their talents on six-guns and stampedes, none exercised a license for reinvention quite like Zane Grey.

One of the most popular authors of his time, Zane Grey transformed himself from a New York City dentist into his age’s preeminent practitioner of frontier fiction. Dropping his first name (Pearl), he abandoned the city and refashioned his identity around the big outdoors, both with his fiction writing and as a widely-traveled fisherman. Grey’s writing often centered on man’s relationship with nature, which became something of an autobiographical conceit.

This brings us to the subject of this review, a novel published in Grey’s peak period and described by the Zane Grey’s West Society website as his “premier attempt to understand the meaning of life.” Wanderer Of The Wasteland features a character who, like the author, changes his name and undertakes a long journey to uncover his true nature. It sure feels personal, but is it any good?

At the heart of the story is the title environment, which forms not only the novel’s main setting, but its reason for being. “Indeed, the desert is the place for things impossible anywhere else,” is how Adam Laret, the hulking young protagonist, explains it late in the novel. Through his relationship with the desert, things have a way of happening to Adam that both enrich and endanger him:

There was sky and wind, the domain of the open and its master; but these existed for the eagles, and perhaps for the spirits that wailed down the naked shingles of the desert. A man was nothing. Nature filled this universe and had its inscrutable and ruthless laws.

Grey’s talents as a scenic wordsmith are on full, vibrant display throughout Wanderer Of The Wasteland. For a while, it makes for the novel’s key strength. But the more he goes on this way, the more repetitive and lugubrious he becomes, a dreary existentialist nattering on about life. Grey is a writer who can’t seem to get out of his own way.

The novel follows a simple plot. Adam sets out on the Rio Colorado, having abandoned his home and his one surviving family member, a no-good brother named Guerd, after falling out over a crooked game of cards and a woman. Adam settles for a while in a mining community, taking up with a capricious Mexican girl. In the first of many coincidences, Guerd turns up there, too, with a crooked lawman who sets his sights on Adam. After some drinking and another card game which ends with Guerd getting shot, Adam makes tracks again, this time into the vast desert wastes of Nevada.

Wanderer Of The Wasteland was adapted twice by Hollywood. This poster is for the 1924 silent version, made in Technicolor, now lost. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/beinecke_library/4133263169.

Once there, the novel sets into what emerges as the major themes, man against the elements, man in an uncaring universe, and the meaning of life as considered in the harshest land imaginable, Death Valley, where Adam finds himself a spectator in a battle of wills between a defiant woman and her vengeance-driven husband:

Death Valley was a part of the earth dying, and it would become like a canyon on the burned-out moon; but this woman’s spirit seemed everlasting.

The plot of Wanderer Of The Wasteland is a rickety thing, a succession of increasingly melodramatic encounters involving guilt-wracked Adam and a series of women to whom he is attracted but unable to commit. Occasionally he meets people, often the same people, in the course of his wanderings, but for the most part Grey’s interest, and Adam’s chief concern, remains his environment.

Entire chapters focus on hunting antelope, how a tarantula wasp nurses its young, and the flora and fauna found around arroyos. Adam spends much time either wandering around seeking food and water, thinking he is about to die; or else pondering a sunset after a satisfying meal. There is a purpose to his wanderings, escaping justice for what he did to Guerd, but it fades after a while as he takes on a new identity, that of “Wansfell,” and becomes unrecognizable as the callow youth who first ran into the desert many pages ago.

Wanderer Of The Wasteland does this annoying thing I associate with episodes of “Family Guy,” where someone asks Peter Griffin if he remembers that time he did this or that and the show cuts to a parody of a recent hit movie for a cheap laugh. Do you remember that time you were in Culture Club? Cut to a shot of Peter in Boy George attire singing “Karma Chameleon” off-key.

Here, we similarly get left-field mentions, following long sections of dry narrative of Adam alone in the desert, of some past episode where Wansfell led a mule train, or else broke a man’s neck. Never mind that nothing so dramatic ever happens in the slow-moving, moment-by-moment narrative of largely unremitting solitude we read about. I wondered if Grey had just forgotten to write chunks of his story.

Zane Grey sits for a portrait in his later years. His work remains known, but he is less renown today than in his own time, when he was one of his era's most successful literary figures. Image from https://www.azopera.org/about/cast-members/zane-grey.

As it turns out, Wanderer Of The Wasteland was cut up quite heavily before it was published, presumably in order to keep an already long manuscript marketable. I suspect the publisher chopped out all the best bits of story, leaving mostly scenic descriptions behind:

Strangest of all rivers was the Rio Colorado. Many names it had borne, though none so fitting and lasting as that which designated its color. Neither crimson nor scarlet was it, nor any nameable shade of red, yet somehow red was its hue. Like blood with life gone from it! With its source at high altitude, fed by snowfields and a thousand lakes and streams, the Colorado stormed its great canyoned confines with a mighty torrent; and then, spent and leveled, but still tremendous and insatiate, it bore down across the desert with its burden of silt and sand. It was silent, it seemed to glide along, yet it was appalling.

Insatiate is a good adjective for Grey’s appetite for his desert setting. He goes to it again and again, posing questions about man’s place in the universe. As travelogue it fills space, and gets you thinking, but it doesn’t do much to jump the torpid story.

Much of Adam’s experiences involve another desert wanderer, a grizzled prospector named Dismukes who comes off a Walter Brennan type. Dismukes drops in for a few pages at a time, to explain such things as burros and the desert’s soulful pull on a man. “The desert is a place for secrets, and it’s a lonely place where a man learns to read the souls of men – when he meets them,” Dismukes explains, before going on to say it is one place in the world where a man can be “free.”

Sometimes the soliloquies stop long enough for some action, but only rarely. Late in the book, Adam does rescue Dismukes from some nasty claim-jumpers, if in a desultory and unconvincing fashion. There is also a confrontation with a rattlesnake, and another with a couple of desperados up to no good with a young girl whom Adam rescues. Overall, though, the episodes are hardly much of anything to get excited about, leaving me to wonder if Grey earned his reputation for western-writing greatness on the basis of nature-writing alone.

For me, the biggest weakness in Wanderer Of The Wasteland involves the women. That Adam is a handsome man who doesn’t have to try hard to attract loving notice becomes a burdensome motif the longer the novel goes on. Females are introduced quickly, express their longings for our hero, and after some dallying, are passed on.

For example, the Death Valley woman has a daughter, whom she decides Adam should find and take up with. She tells him so before leaving Adam for good. Later on, Adam happens upon this daughter by accident, and he finds her to be just as Momma advertised:

“You are a beautiful, sweet, useless, and petulant girl. But be so no more. Be a woman!”

Pale and shocked, with brimming eyes and tremulous lips, she replied.

“Stay – stay desert man, and make me a woman!”

Such overripe dialogue shows up frequently in this mawkish, melodramatic book, to such a point you don’t mind it any more than you would flies on your face along a desert trek.

Did Zane Grey always write like this? It might seem so, judging from the comments of critics like Heywood Broun (“the substance of any two Zane Grey books could be written upon the back of a postage stamp.”) Yet I hate to judge any writer on the basis of just one novel, written deep in a career celebrated for other works (such as Riders Of The Purple Sage and Betty Zane). It’s possible I caught up with the author in a more pensive mood.

But there’s nothing in Wanderer Of The Wasteland that makes me want to give Grey another try. No question he was a figure of great historical interest, able to light up generations of imaginative minds, yet any spark of rogue interest is missing here.