The Great Alone (2018)
By Kristin Hannah
St. Martin’s Press, 440 pages
★★★★
Did you ever contemplate
dropping out of the rat race? Maybe move somewhere remote where politics,
creed, and race don’t matter? A place where you survive by your wits and the
occasional help of the handful of neighbors who live nearby, but not too close?
And wouldn’t be nice if there were eagles and orcas, plus all the moose,
halibut, and salmon you can cram into your larder? Be careful what you wish
for!
Kristin Hanna’s latest
novel, The Great Alone, is set in
exactly such a place; her fictional town of Kaneq, Alaska, is based on the
Kenai Peninsula town of Seldovia, population 30. We first meet her fictional
pivots, the Albright family, in Seattle, where daughter Leonora ("Leni”)
is 13. The year is 1974; Leni’s mother, Cora, is an attractive chain-smoking
semi-hippie with few skills other than packing up the household on a regular
basis to move on. That's not hard; the Albrights are poor as church mice
because paterfamilias Ernt can’t keep a job. He’s both a Vietnam vet and a
former POW suffering from PTSD at a time in which the condition is barely
discussed, let alone understood. Ernt is a powder keg with a short fuse, one
prone to anger and bad choices that make life tough on everyone.
Cora and Leni hold out hope
that a windfall will help Ernt; he inherits a piece of land in Alaska when a
Vietnam War buddy dies. If you’re really not fit for society, Kaneq is the
place to be. If you need an "urban" experience, you’d have to take a
boat across Kachemak Bay to Homer (population 3,900) because it would nearly
impossible to drive there. The Albrights pack their Salvation Army castoff
possessions into a beat-up VW van and commence to homesteading. That’s the
right word; neighbors will give you a leg up to get you started, but they’ll
also remind you that there are a thousand ways to die in Alaska, among them
carnivorous bears, falling into frigid waters, disappearing under winter ice,
exposure, and injuring yourself in a place where no help is available. And
there’s always danger from going whacko during the long winter when perpetual
darkness can last more than two months. If you need more details, read the
Robert Service (1874-1958) poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” from whence Hannah
borrowed his description of Alaska: the Great Alone.
Hannah’s Alaska is alone,
but not quite. There aren’t a lot of people in Kaneq, but it’s a colorful and
diverse lot. With the exception of Tom Walker and his clan, whose Alaska roots
are generations deep, most of them are refugees from civilization just like
Ernt. The town matriarch is Large Marge, a plus-sized African American woman
who chucked her life as a lawyer in Chicago to run what can charitably called
the general store. The other extreme is Mad Earl, a survivalist whose
conspiracy theories would make a schizophrenic blush. His Kaneq is where the
resistance will begin when society collapses, which he and devotee Ernt
reference with the shorthand WTSHTF (When The Shit Hits The Fan). And it looks
to them like Tom Walker’s plans to fix up the town and attract more summer
tourists is exactly the thing that will start the blades to rotate.
Hannah’s novel is
astonishing in its sprawl. She makes us feel both Alaska’s lure and its
terrors. Along the way she probes topics such as madness, paranoia, class envy,
blinding jealousy, forbidden love, enabling behavior, domestic violence, reinvention,
and kindness. Her tale is one of life stripped to its basics. It unfolds in two
and a half acts: 1974, 1978, and a 1986 addendum. Hannah isn’t always a great
stylist and, frankly, her resolution seems schmaltzy and contrived. She is,
however, a fantastic storyteller.
This book has already been
optioned for a film, but you should read it now, as I’m pretty certain Hollywood
will strip some of the nuances and quiet terrors that emerge in the book. This
is a 440-page novel, but I zipped through it in just three sittings. Call it a
page-turner, but it’s certainly not one cut from ordinary cloth.
Rob Weir
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