Katherine Reid is dying.
It is 1966, and her doctors are unable to diagnose her illness. The energy that had brought her success in an Atlanta advertising firm has now deserted her: she retches up most of the food she tries to eat, and her body has become an arena of mysterious aches and pains. One of her physicians, a kindly older man, tells Katherine: “A hundred, hundred-twenty years ago, we used to tell patients like you, patients we had no hope of curing, to go west, move to the country …”
The 38-year-old executive takes this advice. She sells her house and her controlling interest in the advertising firm and buys a small cabin set deep in Georgia’s Appalachian Mountains. Burdened by the necessary supplies for survival and the wreckage of her past—a high-school love killed in Korea, a dead baby, a ruined marriage—she undertakes the harrowing trip to the cabin, where she expects to live and eventually die in isolation.
But Katherine is not alone. Vietnam veteran Danny MacLean has also fled to these dark woods as an escape from the horrors of war and what combat has done to him. He too has suffered losses—the girl he loved has spurned him, and his best friend died in his arms in battle—and there is the possibility that he committed murder when he blacked out one night in San Francisco.
For weeks the 20-year-old Danny remains hidden in the forest, watching Katherine, observing her, studying her, until finally he becomes obsessed with her. He tracks her into town when she goes to buy food, destroys her car to keep her from leaving, and keeps her from dying during a snowstorm. When he finally allows Katherine to meet him, his obsession becomes hers as well.
Diane Thomas’ In Wilderness gives us this story of two tormented souls whose inner demons and despair stand in sharp contrast to the natural beauty around them. As she shapes the connections between Katherine and Danny, Thomas unsparingly shows us both the need for human love and the dangers of passions gone amuck.
To say more here about the plot would ruin this fine story for readers, but much more can be said about the book. For one, Thomas often writes here as a poet while at the same time creating a story so intense and driving that I found myself reading too fast and skipping other obligations simply to keep turning the pages and following the story.
Here, for example, is a passage exemplifying Thomas’s craftsmanship.
“Late one afternoon she lights a lantern in anticipation of the evening, hangs it from a brass hook on the porch, then makes her way down to the pond. She keeps a bar of soap there now, wedged under a rock. It’s easier and more relaxing on a warm afternoon to bathe there in the cool stillness than from a pan of water in the cabin. She parts the dense branches of the budding alders—and stands motionless, stunned. The air above the pond has turned into a swirl of iridescent spangles. Mayflies. So many they have dimmed the copper sun.”
Thomas writes passage after passage with this sort of taut beauty, yet as I say, the intensity of In Wilderness and of Danny and Katherine drives the story forward.
Thomas also has a gift as rare among writers as a Mercedes Benz in a monastery: the ability to employ sex and eroticism as scalpels to cut away the masks worn by fictional beings and to show us what lies behind those masks. Sex in modern literature is often just about the sex, which is a definition for pornography, or else it is mishandled so badly that it leaves the reader feeling squeamish, like a high-school sophomore beside a date in the movie theater suddenly confronted with two people on the big screen flopping into the sack. As Thomas Foster writes in How To Read Literature Like A Professor, “describing two human beings engaging in the most intimate of shared acts is very nearly the least rewarding enterprise a writer can undertake.”
Yet in her story Thomas handles this scalpel like a talented surgeon, using the erotic desires between Katherine and Danny to reveal each other not just to themselves, but to us as well. Here we learn more, much more, about desires they have hidden, even from themselves, about the healing and the pain of passion, about the hunger and the harm bred by solitude and loneliness.
Here is Katherine after one charged encounter with Danny:
“Who is he, this boy with a man’s voice and old eyes, this boy she has let come into her life so completely? How much is there of him to know? It doesn’t matter. He and she are so alike in all the ways that count. They two in all the world have found each other, recognized each other as members of the same lost tribe. And she has emigrated with him to some wild and undiscovered country. How lucky she is, luckier than anyone who’s ever lived.”
To learn whether that luck holds will require reading In Wilderness.