What Came West
A Novel
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A gripping tale of murder and pursuit set against the shifting Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush, where ambition, violence, and destiny collide.
“What Came West is astonishing. Unraveling the mythology of the Western with a genius for insight and description, Weil tells the story anew: a beautiful, ruminative, bloody, terrifying and brilliant book about a chapter in the life of one man and in the life of our country. Unmissable.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
Sierra Nevada, 1840s, just before the Gold Rush ignites. Silas Hall has never belonged anywhere except the wild. Bullied as a child and uneasy even within his own family, he finds brief solace in love and fatherhood before the pull of the frontier overwhelms him. One day he heads west, chasing a life that might finally make sense.
What follows is a swift, pulse-pounding journey into the mountains, where Silas becomes one of the first white settlers to cross into the Sierra Nevada. He forges a precarious peace with the Indigenous people who live there—until the Gold Rush crashes in with violent force. As thousands flood the region, the balance shatters, and Silas commits murder, a desperate act that alters the course of every life around him, including his own.
Taut and propulsive, What Came West is told in two parallel voices—one a tense, third-person account of Silas on the run, and the other a confessional letter from Silas to the son he left behind—and confronts many different forms of American inheritance, in all its danger, emotional voltage, and mythic momentum. Weil’s masterpiece is a fierce, heart-driven portrait of an outsider racing toward belonging and barreling headlong into consequence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lush masterpiece (after The Age of Perpetual Light) follows a trapper's travails in 1849 during the California Gold Rush. It opens with an attack on a prospecting party in the Sierra Nevada wilderness that leaves one survivor. The attacker is Silas Hall, a trapper living nearby. He follows the injured man back to a settlement, initiating a cat-and-mouse game that is resolved late in the novel. First, Weil shifts from third-person narration to a lengthy letter written in a gushing stream of consciousness from Silas to his 15-year-old son, Elisha, whom Silas hasn't seen since Elisha was three. As the letter reveals, Silas exhibited signs while growing up in rural Pennsylvania of what might now be considered autism, such as flapping his arms and rocking in place. As an adult, Silas fell in love with his family's nonspeaking maid, Delia, and she became pregnant with Elisha. They settled in nearby Pittsburgh, which Silas fled due to the overwhelming sounds of city life. The letter, written at a leisurely pace, shows how Silas adapts to the western wilderness, where he mostly keeps to himself aside from befriending an Indigenous boy who was cast out from his tribe. The author astonishes in his ability to imbue Silas, whom the reader meets as a murderer, with sympathy and depth. Weil's revisionist western offers a stirring meditation on solitude and the ravages of the Gold Rush.
