Into the Desperate Country

a novel by

Jeff Vande Zande

a brief excerpt from the novel:
    His line pulled taut with the weight of the nightcrawler. He reeled in the bait. The large hole might be worth another cast. He’d learned that most holes on the Black, no matter what size, usually hit on the first cast, or they didn’t hit at all. No-brainer fishing, his father called it. It lacked sport or any sense of finesse. As a young boy he had fished the Manistee with his father, and remembered picking up trout on the third or fourth cast into a hole, sometimes enticing a three or four pounder out of the safe shadows of a log. There was a mystery to that kind of fishing that he enjoyed. His father, a fly fisherman, always said that the fishing, not the fish, was the important part. He was only a boy then. At thirty-seven, he was beginning to understand what the old man meant.
    Warmed by the memory of his father, he hit the spot one more time. He gave any fish that might be in the hole a moment to settle. The first cast and retrieve could have spooked them. The sun, too, had just come blazing out from behind a large cloud. In a minute or so, another sheet of clouds would swallow the light. He had a moment to look around him, a moment to breathe and think about nothing. Ahead were the river’s riffles, pools, submerged rocks, and deadfalls. Along the banks the wind ruffled the long grass and rocked the black spruce and swamp hardwood rooted in stands a few yards from the river. On a nearby tree, a chickadee flitted from branch to branch. Its head jerked and twitched in a frenzied pivot. The silence in his mind was so complete that he could hear the slight fluttering of the bird’s tiny wings.
    A rustle. He turned in time to see the slick fur of an otter slip into the water. Its head emerged about fifty feet downstream then dropped into a pool around the base of a fallen jack pine.
    He closed his eyes and imagined the otter’s dive into the hole, sliding through the web of roots. Hugging the bottom, deep in the shadows, brown trout snapped their strong tails against the current.
ISBN 1-59661-042-5
172 pages/$15

Three years after losing his wife and daughter to a tragic car accident, Stan Carter abandons his life and retreats to his cabin in northern Michigan. But no sooner than he discovers life again, the real world intrudes on his seclusion, forcing him to return to human society. Thus Stan’s odyssey begins. Part cosmic vision quest, part farcical return to high school social dating, Stan’s story will touch anyone who’s shaken his head in disgust or dismay at the modern world.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
From the desperate city you go into the desperate country,
and have to console yourself with the bravery
of minks and muskrats.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Review from Whistling Shade:

Desperation hunts us all down and corners each one of us at sometime in our lives. Jeff Vande Zande paints an eloquent portrait of this absolute desolation with great care in his debut novel, the tale of a man who finds himself apart from society, driven to desperation by personal tragedy. The title of Jeff Vande Zande's debut novel, Into the Desperate Country, aptly refers to Thoreau's statement in Walden; that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The desperation of life on the assembly-line drives the hero, Stanley, to his own Walden, a cabin by a river near Gaylord, Michigan.

Necessity presses him close to nature, where he lives in a kind of a blessed limbo waiting for the world to close in on him. Unlike Thoreau, he is about to lose his cabin to a bank foreclosure, so his haven is in peril. He is caught between looking for answers to his dilemma outside himself and looking inside himself for the strength he needs to find solutions. Vande Zande does a magnificent job of laying out the maze of thought patterns as Stanley figures out how to get out of the corner he has painted himself into.

Vande Zande, an English professor at Delta College, uses a Michigan setting, with authentic detail and extensive, lyrical description, highlighting the beauty of the area. Passages come straight from Michigan's natural settings: "a cacophony of birds like a symphony orchestra warming up"; "across the river-a hornet's nest the size of a basketball dangled from a thin branch above the water seemed to defy gravity"; "Everything on the water glowed in the moon's light. Downstream the river kept going without him, ghost-lit and gliding until it finally turned a bend". This is the beautiful limbo, the calm before the storm, that Stan is living in for a brief time. Vande Zande uses the opportunity of Stanley's disintegration to show his closeness to nature and involve nature as a renewing force in life. In a way, Stanley is a "natural man." His hair and beard grow, and by the time a young, attractive blonde woman from the bank comes to examine the property, he has become quite apart from civilization, hiding from the weekenders, keeping to himself. When he wants to go swimming with his new lady friend, June, he jumps out of his clothes in front of her, not thinking of her embarrassment. He has become too accustomed to operating on impulses. This is an element in his desperation-he has lost his social graces.

If this seems like another book about love solving all problems, guess again. Into the Desperate Country is a chronicle of real humans in the real world grasping at straws, making impulsive choices, screwing up good things, finding something real. Sometimes, Stanley tries to get help from others, yet he must eventually go back to his own understanding. Like us, he must plan his life or else be pressed into making choices out of despair. We are left with his desperation.

—Anne Wolfe

Capturing the Essence of Contemporary Nihilism
June 18, 2007
By Grady Harp
(Los Angeles, CA United States)
from Amazon.com with author's permission

Jeff Vande Zande writes beautifully. His style is one of concentrated poetic prose that seizes on fragmentary moments of observed nature in the wild and nature in the very rough state of human vulnerability and confusion and disrepair, forming from these puzzle pieces a tale that is at once solid in structure and challenging in content. Two days in the life of an antihero occupy the pages of INTO THE DESPERATE COUNTRY, and while the pace of the book in unrelentingly brisk, the author finds time to raise questions concerning goals and lack of same, approach/avoidance conflicts of relationships, the isolation of contemporary man longing for life to make sense, the panic of coping with society's expectations instead of following personal dreams, death, and many other breathless issues. It is a book that entertains as fast as a flash on the river of life and yet pushes the envelope of reader participation just when it seems that 'thinking' is least needed.

Stan is a scruffy lonely man whose life seems to be careening out of order: for the three years since the odd automobile accident that killed his wife and young daughter he has left the automotive line work in Detroit and has been living in a cabin in Northern Michigan without amenities, with only the ghosts of the past accompanying him on his search for a rational explanation for living. Into this wild comes Jane, a finance banker who has come to deliver news that Stan must make some decisions before he loses all his belongings. Attracted to the beautiful Jane, Stan shudders then jumps into the river flowing by his cabin, leaving the challenging Jane on the bank. Stan floats down the river only to face night and the natural elements, and in seeking shelter he encounters another cabin owned by a similarly disconsolate Dale who befriends him, clothes and feeds him, hears of Stan's attraction to the first female in three years, and encourages him to go for his chance to change his life by seeking out Jane.

Stan's frantic, and in many ways humorous, search for Jane includes meeting other characters as out of focus as Stan until Stan finds Jane and a bizarre 'courtship dance' lasting two days has a tragic ending: everything Stan has been seeking to escape returns under another guise to confront his fear of the ordinary (job, wife, pay bills, boredom) when Jane's wealthy family attempts to suck him in. Stan again flees only to find the pieces of his recent life that made sense are now unavailable.

The story is deceptively simple: the impact is very strong. This reader would have liked for the writing to continue as a longer novel, but then giving more information may have impaired the crisis and dénouement intentded. Jeff Vande Zande is a creative writer of the first rank, an artist who is unafraid to infuse philosophy into his characters' lives in a way that allows the reader to both enjoy a good story while being challenged to address the contemporary individual's place in the universe.
—Grady Harp, June 07

In this increasingly maddening, busy world we are often confronted with the dilemma of ethically and emotionally working through the problems we encounter. Using Henry David Thoreau’s ideas as a compass, Jeff Vande Zande has created a parable for adults to help show the way with his novel, Into the Desperate Country. This book is often thought provoking and funny as the author weaves a modern tale of self discovery and redemption. Few writers of fiction are able to meld Thoreauvian ideas into their writing. Vande Zande “gets it,” and gets it right.
—Jim Hayden, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, The Thoreau Society