Wanderer of the Wasteland by Zane Grey
Zane Grey’s take on Homer’s Odyssey turns up in Wanderer of the Wasteland, the story of a boy named Adam who flees his past and a terrible crime. Adam seeks refuge in the desert, where life is unrelentingly hard and every day brings a battle against the alkali sands, scorching heat, lonely nights, no-account highway men, and tempting yet treacherous women. It’s a coming-of-age tale and a landscape painting and an adventure story, as well as a romance novel and an existentialist inquiry into the nature of man’s solitude and unhappiness. And GOLD! Lots of GOLD!

Nobody writes landscape better than Zane Grey. That makes sense given how much time and money he spent in the desert. The man knows the colors, the mountains, the various textures of sand, the cacti that sting, the flowers that bloom, the horny toads and eagles and condors and sheep. He paints word pictures, most of which translate successfully onto the page. He populates his desert with memorable characters, like Dismukes, a gold miner who toils in the canyons and furnace winds of the desert his whole life, working to save a half million dollars in gold dust, only to find that he is miserable anywhere else but the desert. His story is a tragedy, a cautionary fable about the hazards of too much work and not enough play. Or there is Jinny, a headstrong burro that Grey uses for comic relief. One amusing scene features Jinny getting into Adam’s dough, whereupon a chase ensues, wrecking the campsite, the man cursing the burro’s name as she gallops just out of reach, contentedly chewing his supper.

Adam himself makes a pretty good everyman, though he sometimes vacillates between emotional extremes in ways more befitting a romance novel than a western. He is no gunslinger. He’s a boy on a quest to discover why the desert holds such fascination for men. What’s eerie about Adam is how, in his headlong rush to punish himself over the crime that sent him into the desert to begin with, he denies himself the usual earthly pleasures and attachments. He turns down money. He turns away from women. Whenever he lands in a settlement of any kind, he soon enough turns nomad. Adam is almost a Buddhist in his ability to float above his appetites. I suspect that, sooner or later, every reader will lose patience with Adam’s hand-wringing, or stop believing in his purity.