The Vast Fields of Ordinary

The Vast Fields of Ordinary, Nick Burd's debut young adult novel, is considered an LGBTQ novel. It features Dade Hamilton, an eighteen-year-old closeted gay teenager torn between two romantic partners – one, a football player with a girlfriend who claims the sex he has with Dade is irrelevant because he is in a heterosexual relationship, and the other, an openly gay older drug dealer. Dade, also troubled by his parents disintegrating marriage, spends the summer after his high school graduation trying to find meaning in the confusing world of gender, romance, and life as an outcast teenager.

The Vast Fields of Ordinary opens in Cedarville, Iowa. Dade has just graduated from high school and is working a minimum wage job at Food World, a local grocery store. Dade isn't sure where his life is going, and his parents, Ned and Peggy, aren't in a position to help him figure it out. His father sells luxury cars, but is unhappy with his life; he makes the decision early in the novel to start taking poetry classes at the local community college. His mother is an art teacher at the local Catholic school; her severe depression limits her ability to be a loving and functional mother. Though she takes an extraordinary number of antidepressants to try to avoid her struggle with mental health, none of them seems to help enough to reconnect her with her family.

Dade has come out to himself as gay but has yet to tell his parents. Instead, he has spent the last two years having sex with Pablo Soto, a Latino football player with a girlfriend, Judy Lockhart, who considers himself heterosexual despite his two-year affair with Dade. At the end of high school, Dade tells Pablo that he has fallen in love with him; Pablo's response is to slap him hard across the face until he takes back his declaration of love. Alienated even from his sexual partner, Dade is an outcast at his high school – his peers, including the cruel Judy Lockhart, think he's gay and tease him for his sexual orientation. Around the same time, Dade's father confesses that he's having an affair with a young woman from his poetry class.



At a party a few days after graduation, Dade meets Alex Kincaid, a twenty-year-old marijuana dealer. Dade falls madly in love with Alex at first sight. He gets in touch with him after the party claiming that he wants to buy weed. The boys take a trip out into the Iowa countryside to meet Alex's grower, Dingo, and an older man whose rock band is playing that night at a local bar.

A few days later, Dade meets Lucy, a seventeen-year-old out lesbian from California whose parents were so disturbed by her queer identity that they sent her to live in Iowa for the summer. Unlike Dade, who is awkward and introverted, Lucy is outgoing and confident about her sexuality. The two become fast friends, and Lucy helps Dade navigate his former relationship with Pablo and his blooming romance with Alex Kincaid.

After his last incident with Pablo, Dade has kept his distance. Pablo, however, continues to desperately proposition Dade for sex; Dade and Lucy run into him at a gay bar. Pablo eventually becomes so desperate that he starts exposing himself to Dade at work and spitting on him. However, Dade is more worried about Alex, who finally reveals to Dade that he is gay. The two learn each other's histories and have sex under the stars in a field by Dade's grandfather's house. When Pablo meets Alex at a party that summer, he becomes incredibly jealous. Dade's relationship with Alex inspires him to tell his parents that he's gay – his father is confused by the revelation, but his mother is very accepting.



The novel comes to an end when a central thread of the narrative, the disappearance of a local girl named Jenny, works its way into Dade's dreams and prompts him to confide more in Lucy and in Alex. Dade begins to realize that Alex's excessive drinking and partying might not suit him as much as he originally thought. Pablo comes to Dade's room crying soon after but refuses to talk about his feelings with Dade.

The novel ends with a sudden car accident, which forces Dade's confusing, romantic summer to come to a dramatic and violent close. In the end, the missing girl Jenny is found, leaving Dade more comfortable with himself, his boundaries, and an idea of what he wants in love.

The Vast Fields of Ordinary, Nick Burd's first novel, won a number of awards because of its realistic representation of life as a gay teenager in the rural Midwest. The novel won the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Award, was included on the Rainbow List in 2010, and was listed by the New York Times as a notable book in 2009. It was also a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Young Adult Literature. The Vast Fields of Ordinary is Burd's only novel.