Heroes of the Frontier was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2016. Josie is a former dentist in Ohio who has lost her practice to a malpractice suit (a patient died under anesthesia), lost her partner (he left for a younger woman), and is losing her mind. She takes her two children — Paul, eight, and Ana, five — and flies to Alaska, where she rents a decrepit RV called the Chateau and drives into the wilderness with no plan beyond getting as far from civilization as possible.
The timing is unfortunate: Alaska is on fire. Massive wildfires are burning across the interior, closing roads and filling the sky with smoke. Josie drives toward the fires rather than away from them, not suicidally but compulsively — the fires are the external equivalent of her internal state, and she is drawn to the honesty of their destruction. The children, meanwhile, are alternately delighted and terrified, and their presence keeps the novel from tipping into despair: you cannot be entirely nihilistic when an eight-year-old needs dinner.
The novel is a road book in the American tradition — Kerouac, Steinbeck, McCarthy — but gender-reversed and stripped of romantic mythology. Josie is not finding herself on the road; she is losing the self she had and discovering that the loss is not entirely unwelcome. Alaska provides the necessary scale: a landscape big enough to contain her catastrophe without domesticating it.
Collecting Heroes of the Frontier
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12