This Tender Land (September 3, 2019)
By William Kent
Kruege
Atria/Simon and
Schuster, 464 pages.
★★★★
Did you ever notice how works of fiction riff off of Huckleberry Finn? Aside from the obvious–Huckleberry
Finn might be the elusive Great American novel–it's because the tale is part
of Western culture's DNA. It goes back to Homer's Odyssey and its parameters probably predate him.
William Kent Kruege acknowledges his debt to Homer and Twain,
as well as to Charles Dickens, Sinclair Lewis, and select slices of American
history. He set out to write a Huck Finn-like yarn set during the 1930s but as
all good writers do, he allowed his characters to take him to other places,
hence there's a bit of Steinbeck in the mix as well. On the surface, This Tender Land is like a hybridized
fruit grafted onto budwood, but it becomes something richer and more delicious.
Dickens is echoed early in This Tender Land. We enter the Lincoln Indian Training School,
located along Minnesota's (fictional) Gilead River. The tyrannical husband/wife
team of Clyde and Thelma Brickman run the school, the latter so nasty the
children have dubbed her the "Black Witch." In theory Lincoln is a
school for Native American children–tens of thousands of whom were ripped from
their homes from the late 1800s into the mid-1900s and forced to assimilate to
white ways–though orphaned and destitute white children also ended up at
Lincoln. Think Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby
and you're on the right track. Children are routinely sent to a solitary
confinement, deprived of meals, beaten by cruel flunky DiMarco, forced to do
hard labor, and some suffer even worse fates. The Black Witch is the bête noire of our narrator, Odie (as in
Odysseus!) O'Banion, our 12-year-old narrator with talents for mischief, bad
luck, storytelling, and playing the harmonica.
Odie is unlike his 16-year-old brother Albert, a mechanical
genius, a crackerjack student, and a perceived goody two-shoes. Were it not for
Albert and a kindly German groundskeeper named Herman Volz, Odie and his friend
Moses Washington–a full-blooded Sioux whose tongue was cut out when he was very
young–would suffer even harsher blows. Push comes to shove when a new Indian
boy disappears and a tornado kills sympathetic teacher Cora Frost, thereby
making her 6-year-old daughter Emmy an orphan that the Black Witch hopes to discipline
and adopt.
The Twain part of the novel begins when Odie, Albert, Moses,
and Emmy push a canoe into the Gilead with the vague notion of paddling to
where it joins the Minnesota River, then onto its confluence with the
Mississippi for a southward journey to St. Louis where, last they heard, the
O'Banions' Aunt Julia lived. That's about a thousand miles and it's 1932, the
cruelest year of the Great Depression. Although huge numbers of Americans are
on the road–which provides some cover for peripatetic orphans–it's still a tall
order for four minors. They have some money and papers from a safe, courtesy of
some resourceful blackmail on Odie's part, but desperate times also means there
are lots of equally desperate people on the road, including the Brickmans and
their henchmen who are hell-bent on reclaiming Emmy. Huck and Jim faced all
manner of perils as they floated down the Mississippi and so will our intrepid
band of four. Like Huck, Odie is resourceful in amoral ways that sometimes make
him a saint though he feels himself a bad luck sinner. Also like Huck, our
"vagabonds," as Odie dubs them, encounter others with outwardly
ambiguous morals: a farmer named Jack; a native man named Forrest; denizens of
hobo camps; the Scofield family, who are Minnesota's answer to busted Okies (think
Grapes of Wrath); and Aunt Julia. It
is to Kruege's credit that he keeps us off balance, which is to say that many
of the book's characters are as they appear to be, yet nothing at all as we
expected.
Evil stalks the land, hand-in-hand with poverty. Who does
one trust, if anyone? Can one linger in St. Paul, where Gertie Hellmann runs
the Jewish equivalent of a soup mission? Do you cast your lot with Sister Eve
and her traveling evangelism show? Kruege introduces spirituality into the
book, but it too is malleable. Odie believes in the Tornado God, an Old
Testament wrathful being, but Moses has a Native epiphany when passing through
Mankato* and signs his "true" name: Amdacha (Broken in Pieces).
Sister Eve is modeled on Aimee Semple McPherson and Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, but maybe she's neither of
these. Emmy has "fits" that may or may not be life-changing visions.
Perhaps Kruege is taking us down a vaguely pantheistic path. In Odie's later
year recollections he remarks that there is no single road to redemption and
compares time and the universe to a river that might be God. River, Wakan
Tanka, Jehovah… all the same?
What an enjoyable book! It's the kind that deprives you of
sleep because you care so much about its characters that you just need to know what happens to them. It
helps that Kruege's prose is eloquent as well as compelling. To introduce a
small critique, the book's concluding chapters and postscript feel forced and
overly tidy in the way that many rolling end-of-movie codas feel abrupt. Some
might also read the book's religious ideals as New Age esotericism. (I'm still
musing over that.) But the takeaway point is that in the hands of a skilled
writer, The Odyssey is truly a
timeless tale.
Rob Weir
* Mankato was the site of the largest single-day execution
in American history. Thirty-eight Sioux were hanged on Christmas Day in 1862,
allegedly for taking part in the Dakota War Sioux uprising. Many of them likely
had no part in the war. The president refused to pardon them. His name was
Abraham Lincoln!
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