From a distance, across the lake, the little family on the deck of their newly built summer house is an anthropological curiosity. To a friendless teenager named Madeline, watching them from her scraping-by family’s rugged year-round cabin in the northern Minnesota woods, these comfortably monied city people inhabit a life that looks the way life is meant to look.
“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.”
This cherished creature is a 4-year-old boy named Paul. He loves puzzles and building things; he says “becept” instead of “except”; and we learn on the first page of Emily Fridlund’s exquisitely observed, quietly affecting debut novel, “History of Wolves,” that 4 is as old as he’ll ever get to be. This is, among other things, the story of his utterly preventable death.
Told from the distance of more than two decades, and deftly leavened with humor, it’s a tale of good and evil, second chances, and chasing ideals to the bitter end — holding fast to a faith about the way life operates, no matter how much denial that requires or what awful damage results.
More simply, it’s also about being young, female, and lonely in an isolated place so beautiful that it could take your breath away and so brutal that it could kill you. In the part of the country where Madeline lives, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fishing town called Loose River, the weather is ever changeable, ever threatening.
Idealism brought Madeline’s parents to their 20 acres on Still Lake. Hippies in a post-hippie age, they and six others set up a commune in 1982, and before Madeline was born they all took a vote on what her name should be. At first, she grew up among a small herd of children, cozily sharing a bunk with another little girl.
But after a handful of years, the experiment fell apart. The only people remaining were Madeline, her disappointed yet steadfast mom, and her reserved but loving dad. “I never even knew for sure if they were my real parents, or if they were simply the people who stayed around after everyone else went back to college or office jobs in the Twin Cities.”
It’s not a great way to fit in at school, being the only kid in town from what’s left of an old commune. But Madeline owns her awkwardness with people: In eighth grade, asked to come up with a topic for the History Odyssey, she skips over humans altogether and chooses the history of wolves.
Madeline, nicknamed Linda, is 15 the spring that she meets Paul and his 20-something mother, Patra, who’ve come up from their Chicago suburb to stay for a while on their own. When Patra offers to pay her $10 a day, Madeline quits her job at the diner to babysit Paul. A quasi-familial intimacy quickly grows among the three of them, with all the blurring of boundaries and vision that can bring.
Madeline, so sure of her identity as a freak from a freakish family, so convinced that normal is something that other families are, has only a slippery grasp of what dereliction of parental duty actually looks like. Keenly perceptive in some ways — when a new teacher arrives at school, she spots his predatory tendencies a mile off — she doesn’t trust her own flickering awareness that something is badly amiss in the house across the lake.
Paul gets sick and seems not to get better. “The weather is under me,” he says. Patra’s professor husband, Leo, arrives, and instantly she no longer acts like her normal self, either. Madeline does sense that the controlling Leo is a creep, but she waves that thought away even as misery descends.
“I’m so happy, right?” a weeping Patra asks Madeline, whose devotion to her mixes several kinds of yearning: for a confiding friend, an ideal mother, a crush. “Don’t we seem happy to you?”
“History of Wolves” is a novel of could-have-beens, and that is one of them — that happiness was in reach for Patra and her son. Paul could have grown up into a future like the one Madeline imagined for him: At 15, “the reluctant but radiant star of ‘Our Town,’ or vice president of the student council in an ironic yet good-natured way”; at 26, “with a degree in architecture and maybe an admirable ear for music or foreign languages.”
Paul is vivid from the moment we meet him, a sweet, prickly, opinionated little guy. Fridlund remembers what it feels like to be that young, and she has a similarly direct recall of the sensations of adolescence. What she does most elegantly, though, is transport us to the wilds of northern Minnesota, twigs crunching underfoot in the woods, lake water cradling the body of a canoe.
The novel has multiple strands, and while Fridlund leaves some unresolved deliberately, the ending does fizzle. What leads up to it, though, is an absorbing contemplation of guilt and regret, agency and its abdication, and what it means to survive the wilderness.
HISTORY OF WOLVES
By Emily Fridlund
Laura Collins-Hughes can be reached at laura.collinshughes@gmail.com.