Man Booker Prize 2017 long-list reading guide: Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves

Editor’s note: Up to 13 September, when the Man Booker Prize 2017 shortlist will be announced, Firstpost will be reviewing all 13 books on the longlist. This is your guide to the Booker contenders, and which ones you should read.

The narrative is jagged and told in retrospect: A 37-year-old woman recalls being uncomfortably 14. She grows up in a cabin on the fringes of civilisation in northern Minnesota; in winter, everything freezes to wastelands of frost and snow, and in early spring or summer, the landscape oozes water, squirrels scamper, and maple seeds sprout new roots. Her parents are relic hippies; her name is Madeline, but at school she is called “Linda, or Commie, or Freak.”  When Mr Grierson, the eighth-grade history teacher who has arrived to replace dead Mr Adler, asks Linda to make a presentation for an inter-school history competition, ‘History Odyssey’, she informs him of the subject that most interests her: “I want to do wolves.” Mr Grierson’s response is a reliable, if somewhat fleeting sizing-up of Linda: “I love that. I love that. That’s so weird. What is that about?”

History of Wolves — the title is drawn from this presentation — meets the requirements of a coming-of-age novel. The narrator, Linda, is weird; she has no friends; she can paddle a canoe; she is curious about wolves. She is perhaps comparable to Sumire in Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, who aspires to be a Kerouacian character, wears an oversized herringbone coat and unwieldy boots, and would readily grow a beard if she could. But Linda has none of the cute predicaments or drug-fuelled exuberance or serial sexual escapades of a typical coming-of-age novel. And History of Wolves is not an indulgent account of hormones gone awry, or perverts in the backwoods, or fisherfolk and forest people on steroids.

There are paedophile teachers though, and pregnant teenagers, and moments charged with homoeroticism, but those are distractions, mere detours in a narrative that is urgent in its intent, slow in the telling. Four-year-old Paul dies; his death is the tragedy that is History of Wolves.

Paul is the “kid from across the lake”; he arrives in a blue Honda hatchback, with his parents:

“Father, mother, tiny child. The child’s towel dragged on the wooden planks, and the mother and father had knelt down together, at once, arranging the folds. They were like attendants to a very small bride, doting, hovering.”

That the parents — Patra and Leo — dote on Paul; that they smother him with attention and affection is what amplifies the misfortune the child is destined for. History of Wolves is also a chronicle of tenderness, of childhood games and romps in forests, of syrupy pancakes, Tonka trucks, and overturned chairs that become cabins in the woods. Paul is a lovable, if somewhat manic, child, who “had four-going-on-five-year-old plans: visit Mars, get shoes with ties. He was building a city out of stones and weeds on his deck.”

The kernel of shockingly premature death, which lies exposed in the first chapter of History of Wolves, is nurtured with warmth and care. It grows into a feeling of impending doom, as the story congeals with the sappy innocence of grabbling ducklings, watching a herd of deer take off in the darkening woods, tucking Paul in bed. A flurry of pancake-making precedes his passing away. The windows of the cabin by the lake are foggy with steam from the kitchen. Cats meow and classical music wafts through the room as Leo prepares breakfast in the middle of the night. The narrator recalls:

“So breakfast is what Leo made. He turned on all the lights in the main room and kitchen, went around flicking every switch. He filled a pot with water to warm the syrup bottle and, within a minute or two, had stirred a golden batter, which he ladled in bubbly, spreading pools onto the skillet.”

Death, in History of Wolves, is cloyingly sweet and coated with hyper-happy domesticity. But there are undercurrents in the narrative that resist the steady flow of an enforced normalcy. Linda’s reminisce is strewn with references to a trial; her instinct notifies her of imminent menace:

“At the trial they kept asking, when did you know for sure there was something wrong? And the answer probably was: right away.”

History of Wolves is Emily Fridlund’s fictional debut. Its first chapter won the McGinnis-Ritchie Award, and in an interview to PowellsBooks.Blog, Firdlund mentions that it was originally a standalone story:

“I wrote it initially for a writing workshop at the University of Southern California when I was working on my PhD there. I finished it, and I really did think I was done. I published it, and I meant to go on and do other things. But when I was thinking about a novel idea and a world that I might want to linger in longer, Linda’s voice came back to me.”

Linda’s voice, the canny voice of a 14-year-old who finds herself alone, in the woods, with only her dogs as steady and enduring companions, is the voice that informs the reader that Paul could be difficult: “In fact, Paul and I did not always get along.” Linda, the astute observer, notices that Leo has an influence over rooms, over Patra — rooms fell into a hush and Patra spoke carefully whenever he was around.  It is Linda who provides a glimpse of the town, of a spray-painted sign that said LIQUOR AND GAS — a place run by “Katerina the Communist”,  of bars and churches, the ice rink , an old timber mill, a drugstore. It is Linda who asks Leo what he is reading. “Science and Health” he replies.

Science and Health — the two sections into which History of Wolves is divided, are apt headers for a novel in which both are compromised, for the sake of a god, and a church, that believes: “Heaven and hell are ways of thinking. Death is just the false belief that anything could ever end.”

Things end. Lives are truncated. Even the woods change.