As a nature writer, I have spent substantial stretches of my life observing other species, a summer watching ospreys, for instance, and a winter studying pelicans. This past January I decided to turn my attention in a different direction, and began taking field notes on an animal named Philip Roth. In my head I called the project “The Year of Reading Roth,” a 365-day span during which I would read every word the author had written. I felt a little sheepish about the project at first, and wouldn’t admit it to people, revealing as it did an obsession with the Rothian consciousness rivaled only by the author’s own. But for me it was a return to my roots. At sixteen I would discover Walden and Henry David Thoreau, and veer off in a different, crunchier direction, but two years before that my life as a true reader began with a spark of rebellion: sneaking small paperback copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, along with Tropic of Cancer and Breakfast of Champions, off my parents’ bedroom bookshelf. Back in my own room I pored over these forbidden texts and experienced the beginnings of a transformation. That the discovery of something else—equally exciting, but more physical—was concurrent and intertwined with all the reading added to the electricity. Roth taught me not just a love for explosive sentences, but also the proper use for an athletic sock. Alone in my bedroom, I put the new knowledge to immediate use. Here was true literary influence at work.

Now, over thirty years later, I have returned to the man’s work in a more analytic, less feverish state of mind. One of the early surprises revealed by my field notes is this: like me, Philip Roth is a nature writer. I don’t say this to be facetious, or contrary, but because, according to the dictates of the genre, it happens to be true. Here is Roth’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, in I Married a Communist:

I began to hear once again everything I had filtered out while listening to him talk: the snores, twangs, and trills of frogs, the rails in Blue Swamp, the reedy marsh east of my house, kuk-ing and kek-ing and ki-tic-ing away, and the wrens there clattering their accompaniment. And the loons, the crying and laughing of the manic-depressive loons. Every few minutes there was the whinny of a distant screech owl, and, continuously throughout, the western New England string ensemble of crickets sawed away at a cricket Bartok. A raccoon twittered in the nearby woods, and, as time wore on, I even thought I was hearing beavers gnawing on a tree back where the woodland tributaries feed my pond. Some deer, fooled by the silence, must have prowled too close to the house, for all at once—the deer having sensed our presence—their Morse code of flight is swiftly wounded: the snorting, the in-place thud, the stamping, the hooves pounding, the bounding away. Their bodies barge gracefully into the thicket and then, subaudibly, they race for their lives.

Like any nature writer worth his salt, Roth is deeply concerned with the central archetypal image of the cabin in the woods, Thoreau’s image, the image that would ignite my imagination two years after I first read about Alexander Portnoy seeking solitude for altogether different reasons. For many of us who are drawn to the nature genre, it isn’t a recitation of biological facts or animal stories that first pulls us in—we aren’t looking for the literary equivalent of Animal Planet—but, rather, romance, the romance of retreat and solitude. This is a sort of romance that Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego, knows well. In the early nineties, around the time Roth himself retreated from New York to the wilds of northwestern Connecticut, Zuckerman headed for the hills of western Massachusetts and began living not unlike that of a famous Massachusetts author who pursued a life of solitude 150 years before him. Here is Zuckerman, again in I Married a Communist, describing how the decision to buy his secluded home was inspired by the shack of his friend Ira, a shack he saw when he was young and whose image stuck with him “obstinately” as a symbol of “independence and freedom”:

And the idea of the shack, after all, isn’t Ira’s. It has a history. It was Rousseau’s. It was Thoreau’s. The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped to essentials, to which you return—even if it happens not to be where you came from—to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you’ve worn and the costumes you’ve gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you.

Again and again in Roth’s recent work, we get a sense of the importance of what Montaigne called “a backshop all our own,” a place to retreat to, to get away from the distractions and cares of the world. Thoreau was a young man when he went to the woods and began to plumb his autobiographical depths, but for Zuckerman, who grew up in the urban pastoral of 1940s Newark and then lived for many years “unchained in Manhattan,” the life of the woods is the life of the older man. It is a life he first glimpsed back in The Ghost Writer, at twenty-three, in “the home of an unchaste monk,” the older writer I. E. Lonoff, an early model of renunciation and discipline, of forgoing everything but the “transcendent calling” of literature. Forty fictional years later, Zuckerman’s country life consciously echoes Lonoff’s and he spends his days “reading and writing a few miles up Madamaska Mountain in a two-room cabin situated between a small pond at the back of my place and . . . a ten-acre marsh where the migrating Canada geese take shelter each evening and a patient blue heron does its solitary angling all summer long.”

This life requires “heron-like patience to subdue the longings for everything that has vanished” and to squelch the “pernicious wish for something else.” The world falls away: Zuckerman stops seeing (and having sex with) people, goes for hikes up the mountain and swims in the pond, focuses on work, and, “having entered vigorously into competition with life,” he now “enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.” At the end of I Married a Communist, Zuckerman, like Thoreau before him, even does away with newspapers, leaving the Times unread except for the small column called “Skywatch,” which, by mapping out each evening’s sky, aids his nightly routine of watching the stars before heading off to bed. The book concludes with Zuckerman reflecting on those stars:

You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand.

The stars are indispensable.

How does it happen that our leading urban satirist, our great Jewish mocker of the holy, should find himself writing transcendent lines that would make Walt Whitman blush? If American literature split off soon after Whitman, one side remaining stubbornly romantic while the other veered toward the vernacular—and never the Twain shall meet—then Roth, who in his memoir Patrimony wrote that a love of the vernacular was the greatest gift his father gave him, is clearly in the camp of the gritty, the plain, and the blunt. But Roth has always had a streak of romantic excess, too, riding the romantic’s energy even while mocking it. Consider, for instance, the spectacle of the athletic everyman of American Pastoral, Swede Levov, hiking down the streets of his adopted and decidedly rural hometown, Old Rimrock, New Jersey, swinging his arms and fancying himself a kind of Johnny Appleseed, full of raw animal health—“big, carnal, ruddy”—overspilling with life and the procreative energy of spring. Sure, the fact of his terrorist daughter puts the lie to this myth of health, but if we are to read the book as more than parody, which of course we should, then we must take the “pastoral” of the title seriously, even as we realize that deep cracks rend that dream.

At first glance, writing about nature may seem too soft for a writer who prides himself on being a hard-nosed realist. But contemporary nature writing is rarely anthropomorphic or mushy, mirroring as it does Thoreau’s lifelong movement away from the transcendental view of nature as symbol to the biocentric view of human beings as just another animal. This is a viewpoint hammered home in Roth’s pages, where we are constantly reminded that Homo sapiens, while possibly experiencing spasms of morality or bursts of disinterested philosophizing, is essentially a group of animals that go about the daily animal business of foraging, eating, sleeping, dying and being born, and, lest we forget, copulating. No one, not even Darwin, has written so much, or so emphatically, on the ways sex drives us and moves us and obsesses us, or, finally, on the way we use it to combat the fact that we end up rotting in the ground. In The Dying Animal—yet another book whose title recapitulates our theme—Zuckerman confronts this directly: “Sex is also the revenge on death. Don’t forget death. Don’t ever forget it. Yes, sex too is limited in its power. I know very well how limited. But tell me, what power is greater?”

Sex, then, is Roth’s object of external fascination. In the Berkshires, not far from where Nathan Zuckerman holes himself up, Melville wrote Moby-Dick, determining that to do the “strange wild work” required to make that book, he had to burrow in like “a dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene thoughts, insensible to surrounding circumstances.” Ditto Zuckerman, only substitute breasts for whales.

There is one final way in which Roth’s work is aligned with the work of those who write primarily about nature, and one phrase in the sentence quoted above—“But tell me”—points to this parallel. Though Roth is primarily a novelist, his most consistent formal choice is to use a voice and style uncommon in contemporary fiction: that of the personal essayist. The essayist reveals himself, and often discusses himself, in almost every sentence. The meandering essayistic voice was also the style preferred by Thoreau, who wrote on the first page of Walden: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” True, in Roth’s case the essayist himself is a fictional creation—Zuckerman, Kepesh, or some other stand-in—but that does not alter the fact that his sentences and pages are most often propelled by the classic essayistic style, tangential, full of asides and circlings and confidences, that is, full of plenty of telling along with the showing. It was style created by Montaigne, then yolked to nature by Thoreau and his followers, and employed by a slew of us latecomers. The tone is intimate and confiding, and, in contrast to the flat, direct, less-is-more approach that since Hemingway’s day has been a dominant fictional style, there is something appealing about a writer who knows that sometimes more is more. As readers, we are relieved to be back in the hands of an older, fuller storyteller, extravagant and confessional, a presence with whom we are happy to take a walk, happy to ramble where he leads us, whether through a bustling immigrant neighborhood of 1940s Newark or off to the quiet of a cabin in the woods.

It isn’t too far a jump from Philip Roth to one of the major themes of this issue. Whatever interest Roth has in rocks and trees lies ultimately in their ugly undersides, the dark and squirming life below. Ecotone shares this interest. Running throughout these pages is a section we have chosen to call “A Brutality Suite,” made up of a play, a nonfiction piece, and five short stories that deal, in many different ways, with the theme of brutality. These pieces are the opposite of precious. They’re full of historical range and blood and heartbreak, and taken together present a darker, deeper view of the world than we have ever put forth in this magazine. It is perhaps not surprising that the American West, a virtual theater of brutality in its beginnings, serves as the stage for three of the stories. In “Laidlaw,” Christopher Feliciano Arnold describes the violent, hardscrabble roots of a central Oregon town, and “The Tree,” Benjamin Percy’s story, relates the deep and ultimately violent history of a particularly lonely ponderosa pine, a fable that transforms the pastoral into something else entirely. “Opposition in All Things,” a story by Shawn Vestal, follows a journey of reincarnation from the frontier to a World War I warship and back again. These historical themes are brought into the present in Andrew Furman’s essay “Birding the Border,” which explores the deleterious effects of our attitudes toward migration, both avian and human. Threaded throughout these pieces is a preoccupation with ultimate concerns. George Makana Clark’s soldier narrator, in the epistolary story “The Wreckers,” finds himself in a moral conundrum, caught between love and slavery, and Nicholas Montemarano’s short story “The God Spot” explores whether faith originates in the soul or in the temporal lobe.

We are especially proud of the suite’s finale, Psychos Never Dream, a full-length play by National Book Award winner Denis Johnson. Here Johnson peoples a poisoned North Idaho landscape with his trademark compelling characters: obsessive fringy misfits and holdover hippies, connivers and crazies, ne’er-do-wells—all clinging to the remnants of a fractured idealism.

The pastoral is one way of addressing the natural world, but as these authors so vibrantly demonstrate, there are countless others. They prove something we have long believed: that the literature of place need not be the literature of peace. That it can in fact be violent, wild, strange, and, sometimes, brutal.