Walk Me to the Distance by Percival Everett
"Walk Me to the Distance" by Percival Everett follows the story of David Larson, a Vietnam War veteran who returns to his native Savannah, Georgia, feeling disconnected from his life and family. His emotional detachment is highlighted by his indifferent reaction to his parents' tragic death and his strained relationship with his antiwar sister. Seeking purpose, David embarks on a journey westward and finds himself in Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he spends two weeks waiting for his car to be repaired. During this time, he develops a routine consisting of caretaker duties, socializing with locals, and forming a bond with Chloe Sixbury, the elderly owner of a ranch.
The narrative delves into themes of alienation and moral ambiguity, as David becomes embroiled in the lives of those around him, including a troubling incident involving Chloe's son, Patrick. As David grapples with his own identity and the complexities of his relationships, he discovers a sense of belonging in the rugged Wyoming landscape, which shapes his experiences and connections. The novel contrasts themes of home and family against a backdrop of violence and personal crisis, inviting readers to reflect on the nature of community and individual responsibility.
Walk Me to the Distance by Percival Everett
First published: 1985
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Bildungsroman
Time of work: The Vietnam War era
Locale: Savannah, Georgia; Slut’s Hole, Wyoming
Principal Characters:
David Larson , an aimless young Vietnam veteran in search of a purpose in lifeChloe Sixbury , an elderly woman rancherPatrick , Sixbury’s mentally handicapped sonHoward Dale , a veterinarian who becomes David’s closest male companionJill , David’s sisterButch , a seven-year-old Eurasian girl abandoned by her Vietnamese familyJoshua Lowe , a local rancher who functions as David’s surrogate fatherReverend Damon Zacks , a traveling preacherOlivia , a twenty-year-old prostituteKaty Stinson , a pretty young woman who becomes the focus of David’s yearnings
The Novel
Returning from the Vietnam War to his native Savannah, Georgia, David Larson feels as “unremarkable” as when he left. This general sense of detachment is evidenced by his unemotional response to the loss of his parents in a traffic accident during his absence and the subsequent ease with which he distances himself from his sister because of her antiwar sympathies.
Purchasing a used car, David motors west. Chance lands him in Slut’s Hole, Wyoming, after he damages the car’s radiator while shooting at a jackrabbit. Forced to spend two weeks in town until his car is repaired, David acquires, in quick succession, a job and a place to stay. His time is largely divided among his undemanding caretaker chores at a highway rest area, his forays into Laramie with his new friend Howard Dale, and his life on the Sixbury ranch.
At the rest area, David engages in largely mindless tasks punctuated only by the daily arrival of the red-haired, gold-toothed prostitute Cecile, who offers entertainment to truckers, and by the short stopovers of highway motorists such as Damon Zacks, a preacher fascinated by the view from the cliff at the edge of the parking lot. David’s periodic trips to the city of Laramie are marked by barhopping and brawling and by an emotionally empty relationship with Sarah Newman, a counselor in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The heart of his existence, however, is the Sixbury ranch. David develops a close, comfortable relationship not only with Chloe Sixbury, the ranch’s elderly owner, but also with the land. “He liked the people and he loved the terrain,” Everett writes. In addition to helping out with the chores, David involves himself more and more in the affairs of Chloe and her son, Patrick. After discovering Patrick’s use of sheep as a sexual outlet, he convinces Sixbury to drive with him to the town of Casper to hire a prostitute for Patrick. Although she fails to stir Patrick’s interest, Olivia does become the temporary object of David’s concern and of his misdirected desire to redeem a wasted life.
His quest is interrupted by Patrick’s brief scuffle with his mother after she catches him in a sex act in the barn. Patrick runs away, and despite a hasty search, he is not found for some time.
Only after the inclusion of the abandoned child Kyongja, renamed “Butch,” into the Sixbury fold does Patrick reappear. He abducts the little girl, setting off an extensive search. A party of five men find the naked and molested Butch in a deserted cabin, and they chase after Patrick’s fleeing form. David shoots him in the right arm in an attempt to impede his flight, and the men, with the exceptions of Deputy Quinn Rutland and Howard Dale, conduct an impromptu lynching.
Although the men tell Sixbury that they never discovered who raped Butch, Sixbury seems to sense the truth. Nevertheless, David alternates between interpreting the lynching as “somehow beautiful” and thinking of himself as a criminal. He is comforted by a sermon delivered at the town’s only church, where the minister speaks of how a “bad thing need not be evil” if the intention is good.
Deciding that he needs some time away, David flies to Georgia to visit his sister and her husband. On the plane, he meets Katy Stinson, who becomes the object of his subsequent interest.
Back in Savannah, he is uncomfortable; he is depressed by the conformity of suburban life, upset over changes made to his parents’ house, and disoriented by the crowds and urban energy. David is touched only by some of the people whom he encounters, including a woman trapped in an early marriage and an elderly man who suffers from Parkinson’s disease but who is still interested in people and life. David returns to Wyoming without having become reconciled with his sister.
Once back, David makes the rounds in order to become reacquainted with familiar faces, and he hears that the police are asking questions about the night of Butch’s disappearance. David punches Howard Dale, whom he suspects of having told the authorities about what happened; he also courts Katy Stinson and thinks of going back to college to study ranch management.
This period of suspense and anticipation is interrupted by Sixbury’s stroke. David learns that she may never walk again, but the crisis puts an end to his feelings of being trapped by his new family; he realizes that he loves the elderly woman and the Eurasian child. Katy visits twice to cook meals, but she is overwhelmed by the situation. The police arrive, but Sixbury tells them that she had seen Patrick raid the pantry the night before. This lie puts an end to their inquiries.
While massaging Sixbury the next day, David spies a pistol in the drawer of her nightstand. Knowing that she cannot endure her current helplessness, he senses that she is contemplating suicide, for much the same reason that she had earlier bought a deformed sheep at auction with the sole intention of putting it out of its misery. Sixbury has already made a will leaving her ranch to David.
As in the case of the lynching, David does not intervene. He sits at the bottom of the stairs, with Butch half asleep on his lap, as the narrative ends.
The Characters
The novel’s protagonist is David Larson, an alienated young man in search of a purpose. Some reviewers expressed concern that the main character is not an African American, as was the case in the author’s first novel Suder (1983); Everett, however, seems to be avoiding the issue of racial identity for the sake of creating a generalized portrait of displacement.
The reader must look to sources in Western literature for some clue as to authorial intention in regard to the creation and development of this character. At one point in the narrative, David spends time at his desk reading a copy of The Virginian (1902) by American author Owen Wister. In Wister’s novel, the first serious fictional treatment of the American cowboy, the title character makes a place for himself in the town of Sunk Hole, Wyoming. Like David, the Virginian becomes one with the people and the landscape of his adopted state, and he must face a difficult moral decision when he participates in the hanging of a cattle rustler who had been his friend. As in The Virginian, the setting of Walk Me to the Distance underscores the main character’s development and defines the community that he encounters.
The landscape of Wyoming is depicted as a living presence. Having himself worked on a sheep ranch, Everett knows the country he describes. For example, in the pivotal sermon from which David derives so much consolation after the lynching, the minister asserts, “The thing about this country is—well, it’s relentless. It doesn’t let up. It goes on and on, with this enormous sky for a face.” Furthermore, the minister makes a connection between the land and its inhabitants by arguing that the people need to trust the land: “We have no choice. We are alone here.”
This sense of collective identity, which one character summarizes by saying “it’s like we’re a tribe here,” is the central quality that draws David to consider the place as home and the people as his family. It is this collective identity that makes him a participant, however passive, in the lynching of Patrick and the imminent suicide of Sixbury and then reconciles him to those events, which have, like the landscape, their own “oppressive beauty.”
The land itself demands of the people who dwell there a kind of strength, a determination to make their own way, to dispense their own brand of justice. Some of that inner strength and assuredness can be seen in the laconic speech of the region, a verbal reticence that Everett himself tries to emulate in his narrative style. These are a people who live by deed and not by word. The decision to lynch Patrick, for example, is made without conversation; the men act almost by nature.
On the whole, Patrick is an object of sympathy even at the moment of death. Initially, it is his sexual passion, his use of sheep to satisfy his lustful urges, that makes David think of him as human. It is this same passion, however, that when misdirected toward a child impels the men to eliminate Patrick as they would any animal predator.
At one point in the narrative, David picks up a copy of The Hamlet (1940), by American novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner. This work also includes an idiot boy whose physical affection for livestock is sympathetically portrayed; Isaac Snope’s love for a cow, Faulkner would have the reader believe, is at least evidence that he can feel and that he shares this one important characteristic with the rest of humanity.
Such sympathy, however, is tempered by the necessity for autonomy. There is a premium paid for self-determination and self-sufficiency. Shortly after David first meets her, for example, Sixbury wonders aloud about what will happen to Patrick when she is dead. Her worries are amplified not by Patrick’s inability to cope after he runs away but by his reversion to predatory, animal behavior. Sixbury adjusts to Patrick’s ultimate fate as naturally as she seems to cope with her own physical dilemma. Hers has been a life of grim determination after many setbacks: four miscarriages, two stillborn children, the birth of Patrick, the death of her husband, and the loss of her independence as a result of her stroke. It is only with the last of these personal tragedies that she comes to the end of her resources. “I’m pretty tired,” Sixbury tells David on what is presumably her last night. She has walked the distance, and all Larson and Butch can do is stand by her until the end.
Critical Context
In the wake of his first novel, the much-praised, humorously picaresque Suder (1983), Percival Everett made a dramatic shift when he published the more traditional, more serious Walk Me to the Distance. In some ways, the second novel may be regarded as an answer to his first: Suder offers flight as an option in dealing with life’s problems; Walk Me to the Distance offers the antidote of home and family.
Walk Me to the Distance has not benefited from the positive critical reception of Everett’s first, most popular novel. Many reviewers, for example, have missed the comic creativity of Suder. Even those who felt at times moved by Everett’s second novel nevertheless reacted negatively to what they saw as a narrative style that was too terse, a brevity of expression that perhaps masked a shallowness of content. At least one reviewer, moreover, lamented that the main character was not African American and that Percival Everett, though an African American writer, had chosen not to confront the issue of racial identity.
Bibliography
Brown, Rosellen. “The Emperor’s New Fiction.” Boston Review 11 (August, 1986): 7-8. While praising the novel for its skillful organization and its essential hopefulness, Brown laments the fact that Everett has avoided the issues of African American identity, both personal and societal.
Hemesath, James. “Walk Me to the Distance.” Library Journal 110 (March 1, 1985): 102. After a rather thin but pleasing first half, Hemesath writes, the novel turns serious and ugly. Unfortunately, he claims, the characterization, description of setting, and general tone lack the weight sufficient to maintain the author’s sober purpose.
Kirkus Reviews. Review of Walk Me to the Distance. 52 (December 15, 1984): 1156-1157. Although praising Suder as “intriguing but strained,” the review finds Walk Me to the Distance hard to enjoy and hard to believe. Argues that there is “emotional power” in the “David/Sixbury/Patrick triangle,” but that the rest of the narrative is encumbered by clumsy plotting and dialogue marked by “Gary-Cooper-ish grunts.”
Publishers Weekly. Review of Walk Me to the Distance. 226 (December 21, 1984): 81. States that Walk Me to the Distance is hampered by a spare prose style that leaves too much to reader interpretation. Notes that the novel nevertheless provides an evocative treatment of one veteran’s “repatriation.”
Rozié, Fabrice, Esther Allen, and Guy Walter, eds. As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to Their French Contemporaries. Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007. Includes an exchange between Everett and French writer Grégoire Bouillier; provides insight into Everett’s literary investments, tastes, and poetics.
Smith, Wendy. “Walk Me to the Distance. ” The New York Times Book Review, March 24, 1985, 24. Argues that the novel can be read as a cautionary tale concerning the misplaced desire to escape the problems of the modern world, including the increasingly problematic relationships between men and women, by seeking some imagined frontier. Asserts that the book’s theme and characterization, however, are undercut by a “terseness that verges on blankness.”