All Things Left Wild

A masterpiece of tragedy without closure.

Pathos starts early in All Things Left Wild. The novel’s protagonist, Caleb, at his mother’s graveside observes his father on his horse on the ridgeline above them, wearing a black coat, leaning on his saddle, like the drunk he was, too far away to hear the minister and “too far away for anything.” The story marches forward with imagery of perdition, relentless until the end of the novel’s epiphanic plot, when Caleb observes in his sadness that the answers, which have been denied him, are beneath “a morose mask” behind which “the secrets of the soul are no closer to my revealing them than they were to my father and his father before him and all the fathers back to a time unknown.” So much for redemption born of revelation, a favorite outcome for many novels depicting tragic events, like the inadvertent murder of a boy at the beginning of Wade’s novel. All Things Left Wild does not deliver a successful atonement. The final pages of the novel hint that the soul’s camouflage can be stripped away for a young boy about to be told the story of Lightning. But the novel’s events before the ending suggest that such hope is fleeting.

The novel is set in the American west beginning in 1910, mostly in places described in Colin Woodard’s American Nations as El Norte. Caleb and his brother, Shelby, leave the scene of their crime and make their way through Phoenix and Tucson into the desert where Caleb’s sunburnt skin competes with remorse for his attention. The Arizona Territory and the New Mexico Territory have yet to become states. Crossing briefly into Mexico through the Sonoran Desert they briefly encounter a torrential rain that “turned dirt to mud” and “pooled at the rim of [Caleb’s] hat and hesitated there, as if unsure what to make of this newfound freedom, then continued on to the ground, where it was lost to the silt and slush of a saturated truth.” Randall Dawson, the parallel protagonist in the novel, in the rain at the burial site for his murdered son, observes “the rain was like a crawling shadow,” which when it fell “turned dark brown on the dust before him,” as he looked into the emotionless eyes of his wife where he saw “a hollowness to rival any canyon.” Meteorologic imagery continues throughout the novel, as the plot moves toward and into Texas, where the “stars bore out from the darkness, glowing indentations to remind us of all we don’t know.” As Caleb’s journey moves toward its reckoning, “Lightning fractured the sky and kissed the horizon . . . and this was the storm I had seen coming for what seemed like my entire life.”
The plot of the novel advances in two alternating segments, the first in chapters narrated in the first person by Caleb, and the second told in the third person about Randall, who pursues Caleb and Shelby to avenge the murder of his son. The juxtaposition of the first and third person narratives adds an interesting element to the story, its contrasting rendition of the characters creating nuanced portraits of all the characters in the story, particularly Sophie, Caleb’s romantic interest, and Charlie, an unusual frontier woman with whom Randall plans to escape from his loveless marriage. The events encountered along the paths followed by Caleb and Randall create a cumulative polymorphous portrayal of early twentieth century America, one in which racism thrives, local society teeters on the edge of lawlessness, and morality is twisted in meaning, both for obtainment of money and by a twisted religious fervor by a cult leader who believes that “Moderation is for the weak. It is good only as a tool for evil men to control populations.” The similarities to our current times are haunting, even if we hide them today with clever subtleties.

From one chapter to the next, Wade deftly adds psychology and intensity to bring his characters toward a reckoning. The action is never murky, and the flowing suspense is never allowed to crest its banks, managed in many places by recollections of better times or brief bouts of positivity. Charlie’s dying is paused a moment by her telling Randall of a vision she has of “loblolly pines and the great big shade oaks and honeysuckle growing up over everything and giving the whole world a sweet smell.” Wade uses his wonderful nature imagery to soften what the reader by then knows will follow. For Caleb, he looks out over “the thick grass just outside our pine grove and the banks of the Brazos beyond to the blue water and great hills dotted with green and then finally the horizon as it held up the clouds bleeding into the purple sky.” And then he says to Sophie, “Nothing’s ever been more perfect.”

All Things Left Wild is refreshing for its paucity of political commentary, an affliction so many modern novels are currently afflicted with. Wade’s sensibilities are reminiscent of those of Michael Ondaatje, who also never permits his characters to lapse into political rhetoric. In Divisadero, the three narrators experience early in the story the horror that is to follow them through years of desperation during which redemption is glimpsed but not found. For Ondaatje, a final attempt to see everything clearly, to make sense of all that has gone before, is spoiled on the final page of the novel by the breaking of “the one crucial bone in the body that holds sanity, that protects the road out to the future.” For Wade’s novel, it is Caleb looking at a buck and realizing, “It’s a terrifying thought, that when we close our eyes there’s nothing waiting, and after working so hard on being human it turns out we’re just that–and that means goodbye.”
Most modern novelists, even literary ones, take a different direction from that of Wade and Ondaatje. Grave uncertainty whether life has any purpose just doesn’t sell books. Readers want closure, if not a happy ending. A hero must triumph over pathos for a book to avoid the remainder bins. With All Things Left Wild, James Wade bravely resists the demands of modern entertainment. A tragedy without closure can be a masterpiece, but it takes an extraordinary writer to pull it off.

Story slowed about half way through. I’d call it an “okay” book. Nothing stands out.

A debut full of atmosphere and awe. Wade gives emotional depth to his dust-covered characters, and creates an image of the American West that is harsh and unforgiving, but—like All Things Left Wild—not without hope.

An intense and lyrical journey through the borderzone of the American Southwest in a time before walls, infused with the real feeling of the land, and of the violence its conquest engenders.

Got bored about halfway through. Never finished it.

I love me a good Western. One of my favorite all time Westerns is Lonesome Dove, so any Western novel I pick has to earn my admiration. All Things Left Wild ticked all the boxes for me: memorable characters set in the Southwestern United States at the turn of the 20th century, which was almost a character in itself.

This was a book that was reaching for profound meaning. Reaching a little too hard at times, but intelligent, suspenseful and interesting none the less.

Do you need a cowboy poet in your life? I bet that is a question some of you have never considered. I would argue that after you read All Things Left Wild by James Wade that the answer would be yes indeed.

The publisher of this beautiful novel describes it as such, “After an attempted horse theft goes tragically wrong, sixteen-year-old Caleb Bentley is on the run with his mean-spirited older brother across the American Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century. Caleb’s moral compass and inner courage will be tested as they travel the harsh terrain and encounter those who have carved out a life there, for good or ill. Wealthy and bookish Randall Dawson, out of place in this rugged and violent country, is begrudgingly chasing after the Bentley brothers. With little sense of how to survive, much less how to take his revenge, Randall meets Charlotte, a woman experienced in the deadly ways of life in the West. Together they navigate the murky values of vigilante justice.”

This novel deftly unfurls the parallel narratives with Wade’s dueling narrators, Caleb’s first-person, outlaw rumination to contrast the third-person, poetic observations of heartbroken Randall. Wade transports his modern perspective to this Wild Western, dissecting what makes a good man as well as the illness—something we modern folks describe as toxic masculinity—that gets these bruised male egos in the end. Charlotte—the very capable, intelligent, and unsung Black heroine of the novel—is the perfect voice for Wade’s conclusions on what makes a good man. When Randall asks his wise and beautiful cohort what makes a man worthy, she answers without blinking an eye, “Kindness. Sure, it don’t hurt if he’s handsome and has a job. But most of all, he ought to be kind.” This right here is part of the thesis of this beautiful novel: great men lead with kindness. That’s something altogether different than the typical male trope of rugged individualism wrapped up in maleficence.

But don’t get me wrong. This novel has adventure with wild characters and a philosophizing antagonist named Grimes, an unrelenting villain that terrorizes the Southwest. It wouldn’t be a Western without that. But Wade excels in literary flourishes, painting the landscape with poetic strokes like this early passage. “Things were different at night, cold and still and dark, and when the clouds burned off, the stars were still there as they’d been since before we began shining lights back at them. They scalded the night sky in their dying, and when they fell we whispered wishes to ourselves for things only the stars might understand.” Wow! And that coming from the murderous Caleb, a man most characters in the novel perceive as rough and tumble, but the reader learns is a man worthy of redemption.

All Things Left Wild is a literary Western with beauty and wit, deeper and more substantial than its dusty genre would leave you to believe. Do you need a cowboy poet in your life? With All Things Left Wild, the answer is undoubtedly YES.

I loved this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 5 stars.