A Thousand Miles from Nowhere has been framed as a novel about the social effects of Hurricane Katrina. It is set in Virginia and Louisiana after the disaster, and features Henry Garrett’s unhappy wanderings as he tries to put together his life. But New Orleans is mostly in the background, and Henry spends much more of his time thinking about literature and his own past. As much as this is a novel about a hurricane, it is also about Henry’s own personality problems that shade into mental illness. He spends most of his time in his head and allows his marriage to fail. His wife Amy leaves before the hurricane, and then after when communication is interrupted and everyone is worried about who has been left alive, he hasn’t even got the decency to phone Amy to reassure her. As the story progresses, we learn more about Henry, his relationship with his sister Mary, and their family history, including a father who killed himself. Henry’s journey is one where in which he is looking to work out how much he has hurt other people and what he can possibly do to find a place in the world. For most of the book, Henry is both well-meaning and infuriating but struggling to find a different way of being, and by the end he achieves some resolution. If the reader can tolerate such a flawed main character, it is a rich journey with many surprising events and eccentric people along the way, painting a picture of the multicultural contemporary South. Author John Gregory Brown has a powerful writing style that entices the reader. The unabridged audiobook is performed by Kevin Collins, who brings plenty of nervous energy to the story, maybe a little too fragile and passionate too much of the time, but it is not too jarring. Ultimately, the novel is idiosyncratic, and although the audiobook is only about 10 hours, the work feels sprawling with epic and even mystical dimensions which are a long way from the social realism that most readers might have been hoping for. Still, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere is a distinctive and memorable work.

© 2016 Christian Perring

Christian Perring has taught courses in the culture of madness and seeks out novels addressing mental illness.