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Dark discoveries in a frozen land

April 17th, 2009 Katie H.

Lin Enger starts out his first solo novel* with a bang-literally.  Within the first fifteen pages of Undiscovered Country, seventeen-year-old Jesse Matson, out hunting with his father, hears a single shot and realizes something is terribly wrong.  Scrambling through the frozen woods, he discovers his father sprawled below his hunting stand, the top of his head missing.

The authorities rule it a gun accident, tragically common in the bleak landscape of northern Minnesota.  But Jesse can’t shake his suspicion that his normally stable, reassuring burly bear of a father would opt to end his life without any warning or note.  When Jesse, gripped by grief, sees the bloodied figure of his father appear late one night, he is convinced: Harold Matson was murdered, and his uncle Clay is the killer.

If it sounds a little familiar, it should.  Updating Hamlet to 1990s Minnesota, Enger uses the isolating bleakness of a northwoods winter as his Elsinore, the disillusioned, lovely Genevive takes up the role of Gertrude and Christine, an immigrant from Mexico whose love for Jesse tempers his rash decisions, makes a resiliant yet vulnerable Ophelia.  But Enger strays enough from the original play to keep readers guessing as to what the outcome will be, and writing from Jesse’s perspective adds to the suspense as Jesse questions what his responsibilities are to his dead father versus his remaining family.

Like a lot of first time novelists, Enger sometimes succumbs to clumsy ‘literary’ effects (labored descriptions and metaphors, as well as a curious absence of quotation marks).  After the initial death, the first part of the book moves at a glacial pace, apt for the setting perhaps, but frustrating for those more accustomed to a faster narrative.  Much like Per Petterson’s novels (an author whose work I kept thinking of as I read Enger), the heart of the novel isn’t so much the characters and their actions, but the landscape.  Enger’s wintery world presses down on its inhabitants, the fierce snowstorms are literal embodiments of the confusion Jesse feels.  It is the dream-like, isolating atmosphere that plays on the pyschological landscapes of the characters, slowly building the suspense that pushes the novel towards its inevitable conclusion.

*Enger has trod the north woods before in mysteries he co-authored with his brother and fellow novelist Leif Enger.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction