Things not so good in Norwegian woods
For months people I know and respect have been telling me I would like Per Petterson's prize-winning "Out Stealing Horses" and I kept asking "Is it funny?" and they kept saying, "No, the author is Norwegian." So if the book hadn't come unbidden into the house in its recently published paperback form (Picador, $14), I doubt I would ever have picked it up. And even after reading 100 pages I wasn't sure I'd go on, fearing that the main character's appetite for spiritual comfortlessness was, by the end, going to leave both of us staring bleakly into the middle distance.
We meet this unhappy man, Trond Sander, when he is 67 years old and a widower of three years, his wife having been killed in a car crash. He has just moved into a rundown cabin in the near wilderness by a river, where he will occupy himself with repairs, putting up firewood, fishing, listening to the radio, reading, and being alone with his dog. Here he is at dusk at his stove preparing his dinner: "Outside, the blue hour has arrived. Everything draws closer; the shed, the edge of the wood, the lake beyond the trees, it is as if the tinted air binds the world together and there is nothing disconnected out there. That's a good thing to think about, but whether it is true or not is a different matter. To me it is better to stand alone, but for the moment the blue world gives a consolation I am not sure I want, and do not need, and still I take it."
That temper, that insistence on aloneness and not wanting or needing consolation, yet succumbing to it as a weakness, is what I call Scandinavian, and a little of it goes a very long way with me. Sander's rigorous spiritual austerity is suspended, if not quite dissipated, by flashbacks to 1948, when he was 15 and spending the summer with his father in another cabin in another near wilderness close to the Swedish border. His recollections are of father-son bonding, as we might say, but of tragedy too: A neighbor's child is accidentally shot and killed by his twin brother, who had picked up a loaded gun left carelessly in reach by an older brother. That boy is Sander's friend, and he goes off destroyed in his soul. Sander also remembers his hopeless sexual longing for the dead child's mother, which feeling he seems to share with his father.
I said, OK, Trond Sander, I'm going to give you 50 more pages and if you don't start confounding my dismal expectations, you join Lloyd Jones's didactic, sentimental, condescending, ugly, and cruel "Mister Pip" over there across the room where I hurled him yesterday. Sander came through - or more precisely, Petterson's artistic purpose finally penetrated my prejudices. I managed to stop reading the book through the distorting lens of my expectations. I stopped discounting the feeling for nature, her power and her tangibility, that pervades Sander's memories; I started sharing his satisfaction, both as a youth and a man nigh on 70, in manual tasks well done. I allowed myself to notice that the passage I quoted above continues, "I sit down at the table feeling well and start eating." And beyond the withering away of my intransigence, the plot, whose soil was being carefully prepared unsuspected by me for those hundred pages, suddenly began to show itself in all its enormous, terrible entanglements.
By the time I had finished this novel I knew it for what it is: a triumph of narrative architecture and powerful imagery, and a subtle consideration of identity. It is the story of a life that was pursued one summer in a Nordic world of giant trees and fast-coursing rivers, bloody rivalries, feats of strength, desperate passion, a world where the father-son relationship is elemental and a little dangerous. But then that life, for reasons I shall leave you to discover, veers away toward the modern world, where tragedies are lit by ambulance lights. It has been some time since I have read a novel that pleased me so much in its artistic accomplishment and in doing so completely showed up my prejudices for being the lazy and supercilious habits of mind that they are.
It is partly laziness that accounts for my appetite for 19th-century English and American novels. I can rely on them to wrap everything up in the end, happily toward the beginning of the century and increasingly unhappily by the century's closing years, but wrapped up all the same. There is usually plenty of plot but very little uncertainty that things are definitely going somewhere, that we're not wasting our time. A case in point - and only because I just read it - is William Dean Howells's 1886 "Indian Summer" (New York Review Books, paperback, $14). The book is a comedy, and our hero is Theodore Colville, a man of 41, a well-heeled ex-newspaper man from the Midwest staying in Florence. Here he runs into Lina Bowen, a woman of 38 whom he knew when he was young. At that time he was courting her friend, who turned down his offer of marriage and left him brokenhearted. Lina is now a widow, the mother of a little girl and also the chaperone of the 20-year-old Imogene Graham.
It is clear to the meanest understanding that Colville and Mrs. Bowen were meant for each other, and yet somehow Colville gets himself quasi-engaged to Miss Graham - a most unsuitable match, I think we can all agree. Comedy though this may be, getting out of an engagement, even a quasi one, is almost as sticky as getting out of a marriage in a 19th-century novel. All manner of delicacy is involved, and Howells's job, once he has presented us with this unfortunate situation, is to extract his characters without tarnishing anyone's reputation. While he's at it, he treats us to wonderfully entertaining scenes of the middle-aged Colville trying to accommodate himself to the wishes of the young lady, thereby making something of a spectacle of himself. Still, Colville is saved from looking the complete fool by his conversational wit, another source of pleasure to be had from this novel. I wouldn't go as far as the publisher's website, which calls this "perhaps the most charming and memorable romantic comedy written by an American," but I would say it is one of them.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.
