“Touching and often hilarious.Ostlund writes with acuity and refreshing honesty about the messy complexity of being a social animal in today’s world.” ( Booklist, starred review). And when, all these years later, a new friend in San Francisco offers Aaron a way to locate his mother, his past and present collide, forcing Aaron to rethink his place in the world. But Aaron’s sense of rejection runs deep: when Aaron was seventeen, Dolores-his loving yet selfish and enigmatic mother-vanished one night. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco, Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Mortonville, Minnesota-a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron’s childhood heartbreaks and hopes.Īfter Aaron’s father died in the town parade, it was the larger-than life misfits of his childhood who helped Aaron find his place in a world hostile to difference. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like care of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to take control of his own fate. Sensitive, bighearted, and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confinements of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. (Sept.The debut novel from award-winning author Lori Ostlund-“smart, resonant, and imbued with beauty” ( Publishers Weekly) that “provides considerable pleasure and emotional power” ( The New York Times Book Review)-about a man who leaves his longtime partner in New Mexico for a tragicomic road trip deep into the mysteries of his own Midwestern childhood. Still, explorations of each character’s grief and regret, calcified resentment, and gnawing loneliness are vividly rendered. But the book’s structure doesn’t always support the weight of two dueling stories competing for the reader’s attention-Aaron’s growing pains during his first few months in San Francisco and, via prolonged flashbacks, his difficult childhood in smalltown Minnesota after the accidental death of his father in a parade and the slow deterioration and eventual disappearance of his mother. On a sentence-by-sentence level, Ostlund’s prose is unmatched-smart, resonant, and imbued with beauty.
Yet when he settles into his new routine-teaching ESL to a ragtag group of foreigners and living in a studio apartment inside a garage owned by a perpetually squabbling couple-he finds it’s as unfulfilling as the one he left behind in New Mexico.
After 20 years cradled in the care of the older, stifling Walter, 40-year-old Aaron strikes out from the Midwest for better horizons in San Francisco. Written over the course of 15 years, Ostlund’s debut novel (after the Flannery O’Connor Award–winning collection The Bigness of the World) follows a broken and empty man who embarks on a six-month journey to make sense of his past, in hopes of comfortably inhabiting his present.
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