The Old Man and the Wasteland by Nick Cole

Published by Harper Voyager on January 22, 2013

Nick Cole published The Old Man and the Wasteland independently in 2011.  This appears to be one of the rare success stories of an author whose self-published work generated enough buzz to interest a major publisher.  It's easy to see why.

Inspired by Hemingway, The Old Man and the Wasteland is, according to Nick Cole's introduction to the revised (Harper Voyager) edition, an illustration of the lesson taught by The Old Man and the Sea: you can lose, but only if you give up will you be defeated. The Old Man and the Wasteland is short enough to qualify as a novella, and the revised edition reviewed here includes a preview of Cole's upcoming novel, The Savage Boy.

The old man in Cole's novel lives in a postapocalyptic wasteland in the American southwest. Like the other members of his village, he salvages whatever he can find that still has value. He was once a hero, having made great finds, a refrigerator among them, but later he became a symbol of bad luck, cursed for bringing a radioactive radio into the village. Now the old man hunts alone.

The novel addresses the three literary conflicts everyone learns about in high school English: man against man (a crazy hermit, a nomadic band of killers), man against nature (wolves, scorpions, monsoons), and most importantly, man against himself. As the old man searches for salvage, he strives to rekindle the person he once was, to find what he has lost within himself. At the same time, he knows that the key to survival is to "let go of what is gone," to set aside the pain of loss, to focus on the present, on salvage, not on "what had been or what was lost." The search for salvage is both a test of physical endurance and a test of character. Does the old man still have what it takes to find salvage that will help his village?

From Stephen King to Cormac McCarthy, post-apocalyptic tales have tended to be morality plays, allegorical explorations of good and evil. The protagonist journeys through a wasteland, encountering and rejecting evil in the quest for something good -- in this case, the quest for some part of the past worth salvaging. The falling bombs (and what could be more evil than nuclear bombs?) destroyed much of what was good, but the old man labors to restore the good, one scrap at a time. With determination, he may even be able to restore himself.

Cole wrote the novel in a style that is distinctly Hemingwayesque: plain and economical, deriving its power from the truth that the words conjure. One sentence -- "The line from where he had met the bee and the splotch of green was true and straight" -- aptly describes Cole's prose style: true and straight. The Old Man and the Wasteland tells an inspirational story that, in its own way, illustrates a life lesson just as effectively as the classic novel upon which it is based.

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