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Into the Desperate Country

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Jeff Vande Zande's "Into the Desperate Country" is the perfect read for anyone in search of the always elusive "meaning of life." The novel chronicles the story of Stan, a man who walked away from his safe job on the assembly line and retreated to his cabin in the woods of northern Michigan to fish, think, and try to remember how to be happy after losing his daughter and wife in a tragic accident three years prior.

Stan, however, isn't paying the bills on his house near Detroit or his cabin and is facing foreclosure. Enter June, a collections agent who shows up on his doorstep to assess the situation but turns out to be exactly what Stan needs to help him return to reality. From here, the reader is led through an unpredictable and unique series of events as Stan tries desperately to make June a part of what he wants to be his new life.

What I liked best about the book is that Stan is not the only `flawed' character we encounter. He meets others along his journey with their own sets of problems--a lonely old fisherman, a stoned convenience store worker and even June, who has her own demons with which to contend.

Because we see these flaws in the other characters as well, Stan isn't made out to be pathetic or a lost cause. He's actually just like everyone else, including those that read his story. This makes him incredibly likeable and relatable and he obviously ends up being the guy you root for because you're rooting for a guy just like you. This, I think, took incredible insight by the author and speaks strongly to his character development skills, without which a story is nothing.

Vande Zande also does a great job of moving the reader from scene to scene along with Stan. His transitions are clean, not clunky or jarring, even though, at times, things seem to happen in a flash. A prime example is how the author takes Stan from hitching a ride with the aforementioned stoned convenience store worker to hiding from the police under a porch in only a few short pages. Although quick, transitions between scenes like this are as smooth as watching a well-directed film.

Also, the settings are described vividly and it's easy to lose yourself in the story, imagining you're right beside Stan as he fumbles his way through one strange situation after another.

Will the lessons Stan learns help you find happiness or a sense of purpose in your own life? Has the author revealed the secret to life for which we've all been searching? This is what will ultimately keep you turning the pages until you reach the surprising end to the story of Stan.

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 is 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 June, 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 June, Stan shudders then jumps into the river flowing by his cabin, leaving the challenging June 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 June.

Stan's frantic, and in many ways humorous, search for June includes meeting other characters as out of focus as Stan until Stan finds June 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 June'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 intended. 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

INTO THE DESPERATE COUNTRY is well worth reading. An alternate title could have been, THE TAO OF FISH.

In the beginning I didn't want to read about anything dealing with the automotive industry in Michigan. Than I discovered the main character's dilemna did NOT deal with automotive as much as with himself. (so don't worry, it is NOT about the car industry). I truly wondered what direction the author was going to take his Stan:was he a mass murderere, a stalker, a tortured soul???? I was hooked!

Stan's questions mirror what many of us have asked at one time or another: what is the meaning of life and what is our purpose in the scheme of things...have we wasted our time here? So much to think about...

When the female character, June, was introduced, I questioned whether I actually wanted to know more about her or if she were, in the book's reality, a foil for Stan's struggle with what or who to include into his new "life start." I mean how bloody opposite (on the surface) could she be...compared to Stan's quest for nature's pristine existence where you survive with your instinct and you react and feel the sensuality of the water but yet you are not trapped in a "responsibility laden" existence. Or at least fish aren't.

Ah ha...FISH...Fish lay eggs and fertilize them and off they go: swimming and eating and looking at what is reflected in the water, making minor choices and not "giving away themselves." They hatch, they live, they eat, they swim, they die. No big emotional entanglements. No search for the meaning of their own personal existence... etc.

The Black River...the river of life...Stan should, have been a taoist. Maybe that is what he will discover. I prefer to think that versus he eventually stays underwater too long and drowns. :-)

The author introduced so many things to think about or discuss: job levels and classism as a representation of all the crap one puts up with in this life. Interpersonal relationships.

I haven't even touched on the religious discussion potential...Christianity represented by the fish etc. Taoism and the river of life etc.


Bottom line, I'm very glad I read INTO THE DESPERATE COUNTRY. I liked it. Made me think; and that, as we know, is what "art" should do :-)

Jeff Vande Zande's novel Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press) is a book about a man on the run. The first line introduces a main character trying to locate his place in the world: "Shivering, he stretched his legs into the blackness and tried to touch bottom." Stan Carter is running from his past, for sure, but he isn't exactly running toward his future. Something more expansive and puzzling for Stan is going on here. Vande Zande builds his story from simple materials. A former auto line worker from the Detroit area drops out of his life and flees to his family cabin on the Black River, three years after losing his wife and daughter in an auto accident. It's tempting to suggest that Stan has a kind of nervous breakdown, but this seems too handy, like the notion of the future.

When we meet Stan, he has swum away from June Thorpe, the attractive representative from the bank come to tell him he's going to lose the place, an outcome he has both waited for and ignored. June is an agent of change from the start, coming to shatter Stan's solitude of fishing and reflection. He has been sifting through something deeper than regrets and cares, although there are plenty of both. Stan recognizes June for the big change she brings, and runs on instinct like the animals he observes on the river--the trout hiding in the shadows, the otter sounding deep for its prey, the insects bursting from the river's surface to fly, mate, and die.

This novel doesn't take up much space in terms of time and characters. The real-time plot unfolds over a few days, in a story spanning 161 pages; Vande Zande's cast is small and telling. In a book that could be deeply invested in flashbacks, Vande Zande restricts himself to asides about Stan's past and one scene of a stressful episode involving his wife and daughter in his pre-accident life. This restraint is to the author's credit, as these asides and this scene say a lot.

Trapped people populate the novel: Stan's neighbor Dale, living alone on the river with his lost wishes; Chris, the pot-smoking kid from a convenience store, a musician with no real hope of success; Larry the night manager, Chris's boss, getting through one more shift; June and her practical career that holds no meaning for her. Even the seemingly enviable ones are trapped, like June's wealthy father, the owner of a string of successful theaters who doesn't even like the movies. Vande Zande never sneers over these characters--they aren't treated as little people leading insignificant lives. The novel's compassionate tone embraces them all without cheap sentiment. They are us.

Vande Zande is a poet as well as a fiction writer, and it shows in the clarity and power in much of his prose. To offer a few examples: "Hugging the bottom, deep in the shadows, brown trout snapped their strong tails against the current;" "Thousands of insects flew around his head--nymphs unfolding at the surface into wings;" and "They'd be like two strangers who'd agreed to keep a house together, pay the bills, build for the future, smile when the little girl who lived with them was around." His imagery is often sublimely apt, like the scene in which Stan smokes a joint with June's brother at a family party. "The darkness of the trees loomed above them. Stan hadn't realized that the woods were so close on this side of the house. Light shined from the deck. Someone's elbow poked out over the railing. He studied it. Something about it seemed important, tender even. He smiled at the elbow."

There are moments in the course of the novel when Vande Zande seems to doubt this clarity in his own writing, when a well-delivered image or emotion gets qualified or further explained. Much more often, as the above examples show, his prose is sharp and assured--when he trusts himself, the writing snaps like a trout's tail against the current. With a few collections of short fiction and poetry to his credit along with his novel, Jeff Vande Zande is a writer to watch. Into the Desperate Country will not be his last novel, but it is a great place to meet the author. It is a quiet novel--explosive moments and all--with deeply human concerns, and its effects are cumulative right up to the end. As for the end? I'll only say that it satisfies Aristotle's notion that an ending should be surprising, yet inevitable. You should venture in yourself.

We live to toil, kick the soil, blink through the madness as if it were disco, and wait for death to relieve us of our duties quietly. Generally, that is every human being's plan. Fortunately for Stan Carter, he awakens mid-life following the tragic loss of his family, and starts asking the kind of questions that people are too afraid to ask while they are caught up in the cycle of sustaining the American Dream. Essentially, what am I doing with my life and more importantly, why? Anyone with a pulse deserves to follow Jeff Vande Zande's tale and witness for themselves how one person attempts to deal with the fallout and fumbles through the reconstruction phase.

Appropriately, the story is set in northern Michigan where lack of industry is translated into beautiful wilderness and an escape for the many city dwellers whose cottages dot the rivers and streams far from the sodium vapor civilization downstate. Numb and hollow of the paycheck life without his family, Stan abandons his factory job and retreats to his cabin where he lives the simple solitary life until June, an investment banker, shows up to assess the property. Mesmerized by June's vitality and fearful of losing his cabin, he dives into the river to avoid decision and then, uses every resource in sight to track her down via road trip.

Weaving through the landscape of reason, the underdog Stan and his wily cast of new friends deliver the hilarious while they share a dialog on what moves them. Readers will easily recognize themselves in this vivid fire of conflict and cheer Stan along while questioning their own place in society. Charmingly real and down to Earth, Into the Desperate Country will suck you in and resonate in your mind long after the last page has been turned. Vande Zande's well-crafted novel offers something more if you're brave enough to take it.

This novel exhibits the features of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Jeff Vande Zande leads us with the images of Hemingway's BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER and accelerates the story where SUNDOG by Jim Harrison left us = naked in the river and facing an undefined future.
When, as happens to all humans , our carefully postured existence is changed by trauma ; there is an irreversible hyper-sensitivity to the connections between events and the senses. Neither flight nor flight works for a human in this parallel world where social norms and expectations are frozen and examined for spiritual validity.
This novel is a singular character study. The careful reader finds himself in the triggers: sensual descriptions of nature, and yearnings for Love, and emotional escape , and Death . Violence and fear and pain are derived from the actual events of trauma; in this case an automobile is the mechanism which draws Stan to his internal confrontations with personal meaning.
As the novel has begun it ends, the cycle completed with no resolution yet the fullness of Life is the readers reward. We plunge into the dark water because we seek to understand , knowing that the predictable has no answers . Jeff Vande Zande guides us into the beauty of the world as it is.

Into the Desperate Country is, of course, inspired by Walden. It's about today though, the world we live in, the world of Stan, the protagonist, and it sits directly in the impoverished landscape of 21st century Michigan, and VandeZande deftly captures both the rural and urban landscape of this state. It is an in-depth character study, a comment--or at least an examination-- of the painful effects of loss and how we choose to deal with it. Stan has experienced loss, not uncommon loss, but the type we hope we never have to go through: loss of family, of work, of place, and of the self. We want to both cheer for him and berate him, but mostly we simply understand him, because we are learning something about our own lives by observing Stan. He is on a painful journey, as life sometimes is, and at the end, we suspect that the journey he takes into the desperate country is far from over...

I read a lot of novels every year, and a lot of times it feels like I'm reading because I have an obligation to novels as a genre to keep reading. You know what I mean. Novels have given me a lot of pleasure in the past, and I feel I ought to be reading because I owe it to the novel. It's like when you have an old friend you don't have much in common with any more, but you keep going over to see him for old time's sake.

It wasn't like that when I read Jeff Vande Zande's novel Into the Desperate Country. From the first page I was reading not because I had to be reading but because what was happening was fresh and engaging. Jeff's created a novel with a hero, Stan Carter, who blends the kind of plausible motivation and implausible action that you see in the really best novels. Stan's lost his wife and daughter in a car accident, and in his mourning he's gone up to the vacation cabin he shared with them in Northern Michigan. Up there, while he's trying to pull himself together, trying to make sense of what happened, he discovers that he hasn't been making payments on either his cabin or his house, and both are to be repossessed. Stan's unfolding relationship with the woman from the bank who comes to assess the value of his property is beautifully and believably done.

What follows is great. I'm not kidding. It was easily the best book I've read in the last year. It reminded me of Updike at his best--the same sharp, beautiful language, the same effortless narrative flow, the same intensity and complexity of character. The same kind of crazy male behavior, but I thought Vande Zande pulled it off in ways that Updike didn't.

I really did enjoy Vande Zande's novel.

How could I tell? I read mostly at night now, and when I do I spend most of my time nodding off over novels, fighting to stay awake. It wasn't like that at all with Into the Desperate Country. In fact, the night I finished it I stayed up way past my bedtime (10pm) to finish the novel.

By the way, it was a super ending.

Into the Desperate Country is a quick, satisfying read. The language is poetic, the descriptions haunting, the characters aptly drawn. The hero is deeply flawed, seemingly over his head, in need of an angel to rescue him. By the end, it is clear that his own choices are responsible for his downfalls. The novel beings slowly, takes on an almost comic tone, then fittingly swings full circle, giving you a surprise at the end that makes you want to imagine more, so caught up you will be. A steal at $20.

We all go through periods in life when we feel like Stan. Stan is not sure where he is at in life, what his past means to him and where his future is headed. He is a lost soul and afraid to move forward. I am continuing to think, about how Stan is stuck in his fear of finding real, pure happiness, a couple weeks after I am done reading VandeZande's excellent work!!