Drawn to the “outlaw sensibility” of the Wild West since childhood, author Josh Weil has channeled his lifelong fascination into the creation of his fourth published book. The Leverett-grown writer will read from his latest novel, “What Came West,” at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley on Thursday, July 30 at 7 p.m.
Set in the Sierra Nevada during 1849, the novel follows Silas Hall, a man with autism navigating a world entirely unequipped to support him. As a child attending a one-room schoolhouse, he endures the torment of bullies while flapping his hands to cope. Throughout his life, he rocks to self-regulate, battles challenging impulses, and suffers from a severe intolerance to overlapping, loud noises. Though Silas’ parents love and accommodate him as best they can, he constantly struggles against the constraints of an unyielding society.
Weil said that his decision to make Silas blatantly neurodivergent was born out from “the necessity of the story.” He needed a character who would understand the destruction of the natural world because of human influence, one of the novel’s core themes, on a deep level. In his childhood, Silas becomes catatonic when a beloved elm tree outside his house is felled — a metaphor for that environmental destruction.
“That landscape had to be of such vital importance to the character that it would be more than just for any of us,” Weil said. “I was looking for, specifically, what would turn his interiority, turn his psychology, into that extreme need for this solitude and this peace and what the natural world provided him.”
Silas is able to find self-expression and solace through drawing. As he writes in a letter to his son Elisha, “I had found that if I could locate a scrap of paper, a little chalk, I’d be all right. Hunched over the page, lost in remaking whatever was before me — a ladle, a leaf — I just might keep the rest at bay. For this is drawing: Clearing something in the crowded world of everything around till there is only the thing itself.”
The illustrations that appear in the book — intended to be Silas’ own sketches — were actually hand-drawn by Weil. The author spent roughly six months creating the artwork, utilizing a traditional dip pen and bottled ink to ensure historical accuracy. He credits longtime Amherst Regional High School art teacher Blanche Derby for imparting those foundational skills to him years ago.
“I felt like kind of a fool when I was partway through it, and I was like, ‘Man, I’m spending way more time on this than I ever intended, but in the end, I hope that’s worth it,’” he said.
Though audiences may sympathize with many of Silas’ struggles as a neurodivergent person in a world not designed to accommodate him, he is not a solidly righteous character. Drawn to the West and overwhelmed by the noise of Pittsburgh, he ultimately deserts his family, leaving behind his son, Elisha, and his nonverbal wife, Delia.
He is also — no spoilers — a murderer.
“Though you may imagine what I have done. Think me a violent man. Grown from a violent child. I am not. Was not,” Silas writes in a letter to his son. Throughout the novel, Silas’ correspondence are written with similar grammatical issues and abbreviations. “No if there was ever a violence it was not in me but btwn me & the world. My skin a wick. My blood oil. And everything that tried to touch me sparks.”
The inspiration for Weil’s novel sprang from his lifelong fascination with the American frontier, particularly its “outlaw sensibility” and freedom from civilized society. Raised on classic Westerns, Weil spent his childhood embarking on rugged road trips with his father and brother.
“We’d always be heading for the West,” he said. “We’d be going for the mountains and we’d go backpacking, so it had a mythological feel.”
That love carried through to his adult life. Weil now lives in Nevada City, California, where he wrote most of the book in a 1959 camper-trailer over the course of six years. His detailed descriptions of the book’s natural world came in part from his own observations, like watching a mountain lion or a heron right outside his window as he worked. Weil also consulted with an expert on the language spoken by the Nisenan tribe, whose members appear as characters in the book, to ensure accuracy.
Ultimately, Weil wants people to get a well-rounded sense of the “Wild West” that includes environmental destruction and harms against Indigenous peoples. Still, he said, “There’s also a truth in the romanticism and the wonderful things about the freedom and the dogged pursuit of individual lives and the ruggedness.”
“All of those are real, too, and those are held at the same time,” he continued. “I think a complex understanding of that part of American history and increased complexity would be great.”
Admission to the reading is free, but registration is required at odysseybks.com.
