Clara’s Verdict
Percival Everett is having his moment, and I mean that with absolute sincerity rather than the faint condescension the phrase sometimes carries. His Booker Prize-shortlisted James introduced him to a new generation of British readers, but those who’ve followed the trail back through his career will find Walk Me to the Distance — a reissued early novel, narrated here by Jared Zeus — a fascinating and somewhat rawer version of the voice that became unmistakable. The New York Times is right that Everett has « mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock-out comedy, » and this novel demonstrates both capacities at work, sometimes within the same paragraph. It’s not his best book, but it is a book that couldn’t have been written by anyone else.
About the Audiobook
David Larson returns from Vietnam to find that home no longer exists for him: his parents are dead, and his anti-war sister cannot bring herself to welcome him back. He travels west, ends up in the fictional Slut’s Hole, Wyoming — the name alone signals that we are in Everett’s terrain, where bleakness and dark comedy coexist — and falls into a makeshift family with Chloë Sixbury, a one-legged widow, and her disabled son. When he takes in Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at a highway rest stop, the family unit is complete, but violence remains at the edge of every scene.
Everett is working with the genre conventions of the Western and the Southern Gothic simultaneously, and the Wyoming landscape serves both. The frontier codes of justice — loyalty, retribution, silence — sit alongside the Gothic’s insistence that the past is never finished. Larson is a Vietnam veteran in the tradition of damaged American masculinity, but Everett refuses to give him the usual redemption arc; the resolution is more ambiguous and therefore more honest. Part of the Picador Collection’s fiftieth anniversary series, this edition is a reminder that Everett’s voice was fully formed very early.
The Narration
Jared Zeus brings a grounded, unhurried quality to Larson’s narration that suits the landscape well — there are long passages of Wyoming sky and road, and Zeus doesn’t try to fill them. The violence, when it comes, is delivered without theatrical emphasis; Everett’s prose understatement is matched by the narrator’s refusal to amplify. The quieter moments — Larson with Chloë, with the silent son, with Butch — are handled with a delicacy that makes the recurring threat of brutality more, not less, disturbing. This is skilled, responsive narration.
What Readers Say
At 4.4 stars from 283 reviewers, Walk Me to the Distance has found a receptive audience. The reviewer hobbit-at-heart, who came to this after reading James, calls it « brilliant but brutal » and notes that « the characters were believable and I was transported to a place that felt real. » John Davies, also a returning reader, describes it as « an early novel and by no means his best, but I still got caught up with the characters and cared about their fates » — which is precisely the right calibration. Diana gives five stars and calls it « an extraordinary novel. » The consensus position seems to be that this is a genuinely significant early work that rewards Everett admirers even when it is less controlled than his mature writing.
Who Should Listen?
If you have read and admired James and want to understand where Everett comes from, start here. This is also the right book for listeners who enjoy American literary fiction that takes the Western genre seriously rather than ironically — Cormac McCarthy’s territory, though Everett’s comedy and his concern with race give the work a distinctly different moral register. It is not an easy listen; the cruelty is real and the landscape is bleak. But it is exactly the kind of audiobook that justifies the medium’s capacity for sustained, complex literary experience.
Listen to Walk Me to the Distance on Audible UK — find it via this link. Also available on Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
