In the Distance by Hernan Diaz

Published 2017 · 256 pages · 81,378 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

How hard is In the Distance to read?

In the Distance scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
Diaz writes in crisp, precise English that draws heavily on the physical world—geological, anatomical, and naturalist vocabulary surfaces throughout (charqui, cañon, bibelots, gewgaw, epaulettes, aiguillettes, marquetry). The register stays consistent: neither ornate nor plain, it has the quality of translation—careful, exact, slightly formal. Readers encounter unfamiliar terms from period and craft but never face linguistic performance.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Sentences tend to be long and cumulative, piling subordinate clauses with a quiet confidence that recalls nineteenth-century prose. Diaz favors inventories and extended descriptions—lists of objects, animals, actions—that build texture without obscuring meaning. The syntax is stately rather than convoluted; it asks for patience rather than puzzlement.
Abstraction: 50 out of 100
The novel stays grounded in the physical: weather, wounds, hunger, the exact mechanics of a horse surgery or a coat made of stitched pelts. Abstract ideas—language, belonging, the ethics of violence—enter through action and object rather than discourse. When Lorimer delivers his speeches about matter and immortality, they feel like interruptions in an otherwise concrete world.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Each chapter covers large stretches of time and terrain with economical precision; the novel never lingers long enough to become saturated. Lorimer's lectures on natural history, the embedded mythology of the Hawk, and Håkan's silent observations all carry conceptual weight. But Diaz spaces these doses out, and the clean prose prevents accumulation from becoming overload.
Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
The novel's meaning lives beneath its surface. Håkan barely speaks and never explains himself; readers must infer his inner life from what he notices, touches, or avoids. The frame—an old man talking to a campfire—withholds its revelations incrementally, and the gap between the Hawk legend (monstrous) and Håkan's actual experience (bewildered, gentle) must be assembled by the reader without authorial guidance.
Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
Diaz loads his landscape with silent significance: the coat Håkan builds from every animal he encounters becomes a map of his journey and an armor against language; the compass points east but Håkan can never reach east; mirrors appear at pivotal moments when Håkan must reckon with his own face and identity. The desert itself functions as a symbolic field—blank, inhospitable, mirroring his estrangement from the world. These symbols accumulate without announcement.
Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
The Hawk myth—circulating as tabloid horror—runs against Håkan's actual experience as a frightened, linguistically marooned boy. This gap is ironic, but Diaz plays it straight rather than winking. The novel generates its irony structurally, through juxtaposition, not through authorial commentary. There is no satirical apparatus; the distance between legend and truth is left for the reader to measure.
Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100
The ending refuses resolution in any conventional sense. The central longing—reunion with Linus—goes unfulfilled. The final scene dissolves Håkan into whiteness with an image that is more gesture than conclusion. Questions about his guilt, his fate, and whether he ever finds peace remain unanswered. The novel ends as it began: with a body moving through an empty white expanse, destination unknown.
Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
The novel uses a frame narrative—an old man on an icebound ship telling his life story to a boy—then shifts into chronological chapters covering decades of wandering. The numbered chapters (1, 2, 3... 24, 27) suggest gaps and omissions; we never read the missing chapters. The frame encloses the life story without quite explaining it, and the structure implies that much of the most important material has been skipped over.

How In the Distance is regarded

In the Distance holds a literary regard score of 49 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where In the Distance sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (158 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, In the Distance scores 87 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic (with mythic residue)
He was just something that kept going. Not because it wanted to, but because that was the way it had been built.
Symbol: Formal
The variety of animals that had gone into this coat, as well as the different stages of decrepitude of the hides, gave an idea both of how long the garment had been in the making and of how widely its wearer had travelled.
Mythos: Irony iv (Tragic Pathos) (irony iv)
those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.
Genre: Romance + Novel + Anatomy
Merchants, incense, tattoos, wagons, fiddlers, steeples, sailors, sledgehammers, flags, steam, beggars, turbans, goats, mandolin

Where the story of In the Distance takes place

  • American West from the gold rush to the railroad and mining boom, c.1850-1880 (1850 to 1880), the main setting
  • Rural Sweden, Portsmouth and the voyage round Cape Horn, 1840s (1840 to 1850)
  • Ice-bound schooner Impeccable off Alaska, frame narrative, April (1870 to 1890)

5 things that are true of In the Distance, with the passage for each

  1. Håkan loses his brother Linus in a crowd at Portsmouth after they have just walked off the boat.

    Håkan looked to his right, and his brother was gone.

  2. The ship Håkan boards by mistake calls first at Buenos Aires, not New York.

    ‘New York? No! Not New York,’ the sailor said. ‘Buenos Aires.’

  3. Håkan performs surgery on his own horse to remove sand from its colon.

    After making a large cut into the pony’s abdomen, he had no trouble finding the large colon.

  4. A sheriff stitches a cross into Håkan's chest.

    Before fainting, Håkan managed to lift up his head and see a coarse, irregular cross stitched onto his chest, right over his heart.

  5. In Clangston, a stage show plays 'the Hawk' with an actor in a fake lion skin on stilts.

    His lion fur was a grotesque fake, made of patched-up rodent skins and wool. He was wearing stilts.

Scenes in In the Distance that Frye would name

49 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Agon, untitled
He raised his arm, swung the kingbolt, and knocked the man’s brains out. The trail ambush is Håkan's central violent combat, and he is stripped of heroism by it.
Pharmakos, untitled
The rotten vegetables and eggs hit him before the screams did. Håkan is paraded and pelted by a mob as the community's sacrificial villain.
Pathos, untitled
Asa’s body strapped to it. Right under Håkan. Asa’s head shining with blood. Asa's death is the book's heaviest loss and sends Håkan into the burrow.
Alazon, untitled
They voted for me, you know. I was elected. Captain of the party. Jarvis is a braggart-swindler who sells land he does not own.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Both men were paralysed during this moment of mutual recognition. The paint stains on the 'rescuer' reveal the fraud and set off the massacre.
Pathos, untitled
Surprised, the one with the knife slashed her throat. Helen's murder is the book's emotional pathos and fixes his guilt.

Books that share these scenes with In the Distance

About the author

Hernan Diaz