Religion, Uncategorized

Spittoons, and my day job, plus a heresy at no extra charge

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In my ongoing project of audiobooking Troll Valley this morning (I’m about 80% through it now), I came on a mention of a spittoon, and it got me thinking…

But first, let me tell you about my day job. I’ve already declared that I won’t describe exactly what I’m doing (temporarily), but let me speak in general terms.

Imagine you’re a teacher. In Middle School, say. (The horror! The horror!)

And imagine you’re grading English essays. (I suppose some of you may have experienced this trauma in real life.)

And imagine (implausible as it may sound) that those essays aren’t very good. That the same mistakes are made over and over. You’re not even getting original mistakes.

And imagine the pile of essays is about ten feet high. And it never seems to diminish.

That’s what my temporary, online job is like.

Thank you. Now that’s off my chest.

So, there was a brief appearance by a spittoon in today’s chapter of Troll Valley. And that reminded me of something.

A while back, a pastor I know, who at one time served my home congregation, asked me, “Do you remember anything about spittoons in the back of Hauge Church? Somebody told me they used to have spittoons back there. The ladies let them have them, just in that section, but the men who used them had to clean them out themselves.”

And it seemed to ring a bell (no doubt a brass bell). This would be part of my very earliest memories – and with memories that old, I’ve learned that I’m highly suggestible. So I’m not at all sure here. But I have an idea I may have seen the spittoons back there, in the rear alcove of our church, next to the entryway, where my family always sat when I was little. There were warm air registers in the floor, I’m pretty sure, and I think I recall a spittoon sitting on top of one. I may have asked about it when they disappeared, too.

Or maybe not.

We Haugean Lutherans had a weird (I was tempted to say “fraught,” but I hate the way people use that word these days) relationship with tobacco in the old days. I remember discussing sin with my saintly grandmother one day, confidently asserting that drinking and smoking were both sins, but drinking was worse.

A pastor I knew years ago always used to link Haugeans to cigars. Somebody had told him that all the Haugeans back home had smoked big cigars, and that was all he knew about us, or cared to know. (I suppose it had something to do with the prosperity of some of the Haugean merchants back in Norway.)

Dad recalled how his grandfather was forced, by the two unmarried daughters who kept house for him in his old age, to always go out on the porch to smoke his pipe. (I incorporated this into Troll Valley.) Dad felt that was demeaning to the old man.

I saw a short video recently – think it was by Rory Sutherland – in which he was asked what secret, heretical views he held. And he said he thought tobacco was good for you, and will make a social comeback in time.

I’d almost welcome it. I know, there are lots of people who find the smell revolting, and some even get sick from it.

But I grew up in a world of ubiquitous tobacco smoke. I always kind of liked the smell, myself.

And it is an appetite suppressant. We were all a lot thinner back when we were lighting up rather than munching on chips all the time.

I think my rooting in secret for tobacco, though, mostly rises from my instinctive dislike for everything that’s fashionable.

Just don’t chew it. Spittoons are nasty.

Reviews

Film review: ‘The Accountant 2,’ plus some whining

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I saw The Accountant 2, on Amazon Prime, and my purposes tonight is to write about that.

But first, a little about my aches and pains. Because I’m old, dadgummit, and I find the spectacle of my personal deterioration endlessly fascinating.

And since I’m such a transcendent wordsmith, it must surely fascinate you, too.

What I mean to say is, yesterday I was moving around in considerable pain. The pain was in my lower back. I felt like I’d fallen and bruised it (I hadn’t), or I’d strained a muscle (not to my knowledge), or I’d overworked myself lifting and carrying heavy things (ha ha ha).

I had done none of those. Sunday was a quiet day for me, and I’d spent it mostly reclining on my couch or (for a touch of variety) on my bed.

The point is, I did nothing.

And the following day I felt like Sisyphus on one of his bad mornings.

To put it another way – I am now at a point in my life where I can hurt myself by doing nothing at all.

And behold, a great fear came upon me, yesterday. “This affliction befell me for no reason, in the manner made popular by Job the patriarch. So if it came from nothing, maybe there’s no way to get rid of it, either. Maybe this is my new normal. I’m old. Anything can happen!”

But I’m better today. Stiff, but I can walk sort of normally, and I went to the gym. Which is a great relief to me, as well as to all my legions of admirers.

Just needed to get that off my chest.

Anyway, The Accountant 2.

I liked the first Accountant movie very much. I seem to respond well to any story about autistic characters, which leads me to suspect I’m probably on the spectrum myself.

But not like Christian Wolff, our hero (Ben Affleck) is. Christian can do the most complex math in his head. He lives a strictly regimented life, dwelling in a surgically clean and neat Airstream trailer (though he’s fabulously rich), eating precisely the same foods every day, wearing precisely the same clothing. He craves order and peace, but happens to be a deadly martial artist. (Just another way of ordering chaos.)

He makes his living doing the books for various illegal enterprises – criminal gangs, drug smugglers. He seems to have no conscience about such matters, but does feel strong bonds of loyalty to old friends, and to his brother Braxton – though he never calls him and does not miss him in his absence.

As the movie starts, an old friend of Christian’s is murdered, in an incident involving a mysterious female assassin, Anaïs. He is called in by Marybeth Medina, director of the FBI division FinCEN, to help her find the murderers. Christian in his turn calls on his brother Braxton, who’s a professional assassin. We get to observe a lot of amusing sibling dynamics as these two strange men revert to childhood patterns. Braxton, who is relatively “normal” (for a killer), is frustrated by his brother, but also protective of him.

The partnership with Marybeth has to be ill-fated – being a good Fed, she has lines she won’t cross in an investigation. Christian isn’t even aware of such lines. They then proceed on separate paths, until they reconverge in a confrontation with vicious human traffickers and the mysterious Anaïs, who carries a dangerous secret.

I enjoyed The Accountant 2 fully as much as the first film. (Ben Affleck was born to play an autistic character.) But I have ambivalent feelings about the story, from a moral point of view. Here we have a character who seems to possess no moral sense – only a personal sense of order. And we pair him with another character (his brother) who’s almost equally deadly and has suppressed his conscience. Yet both are intensely sympathetic and relatable – I suspect we’re all growing a little autistic in the modern world, which is what makes these movies so compelling.

Interestingly, there’s a scene in The Accountant 2 that mirrors one of the most memorable scenes in Gregg Hurwitz’s latest Orphan X novel, Nemesis. Both scenes involve an autistic person getting into Country line dancing, and finding themselves unexpectedly in happy synch with other humans. Both scenes work very well, though they come out differently.

So, in conclusion, I’m not sure what to make of The Accountant 2 in moral terms, but I sure had a good time with it. Especially recommended for the socially awkward. Cautions, needless to say, for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Small Favor,’ by Jim Butcher

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I kept wondering, as I read Jim Butcher’s Small Favor, the 10th volume in his Harry Dresden urban fantasy series, why I don’t like these books more. I’d read one before, and wasn’t over the moon about it. But I watched the short-lived cable series loosely based on the books, and found that amusing, so when a deal came up, I figured I’d try another one. Alas, no joy. It just didn’t work for me. And yet everything’s there – good writing, vivid characters, plenty of action, and even a palpable penumbra of Christianity (fairly explicit in this book).

In Small Favor, Chicago wizard Harry Dresden gets a call from his female cop friend Murphy, who asks him to consult on yet another bizarre crime. This time the front has been knocked off a downtown building, presumably by supernatural means. Harry soon realizes that the building had contained a magical safe room – a place for a wizard to hide from spells and powers – yet some unimaginable force has pried the safe room open. Its occupant, Chicago gangster and magical hanger-on “Gentleman” Johnnie Marcone, has vanished.

This constitutes a crisis worthy of a meeting of the Wizard’s Council, of which Harry is a member. Action must be taken. The Enemy here is sinister enough that Harry is called on to rescue Marcone. For help he turns to his friend Michael, a member of the Knights of the Cross.

As an added complication, Harry has offended some powerful Faeries, who send a weird iteration of the Three Billygoats Gruff after him – no laughing matter.

There’s nothing wrong with the Harry Dresden books. I recognized, even as I read, that I was dealing with quality material. And yet, somehow, I couldn’t get into it.

First of all, I guess wizardry just doesn’t appeal to me. Gandalf’s all right, because he’s essentially an angel and does most of his wonders through his words alone. But more than that, pentagrams and sigils and spells, those things just creep me out.

Also, the level of action was Tom Cruise movie high. Harry caromed from one deadly peril to another, each more dire than the last, with only a few pages in between for rest and character development.

That kind of story just wears this old man out. I like a more sedate pace.

But your mileage is very likely to vary. These books are highly popular, and if you like this sort of thing I think you’ll like Small Favors a lot.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Muus vs. Muus,’ by Bodil Stenseth

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It must have been the biggest news story to ever come out of the community where I grew up. Perhaps it says something about our spirit of reconciliation that I never heard about it until I was an adult.

A group of my surviving high school class members gathered for an informal reunion back in (I think) 2010. We were at the home of one of my classmates, in the township of Holden, just north of town. I was standing in the yard, looking over at the church a little to the east, and a friend came up beside me and said, “You know there was a big scandal with the pastor in that church, back in pioneer days.”

“B. J. Muus?” I asked. I knew that Pastor Muus, the founder of St. Olaf College, had been the original pastor there.

“Yeah,” he said. “Something about his wife suing him for divorce.”

Later on, I was told that the house where we were meeting that evening had been the home of the local doctor, who’d been accused of having an affair with Mrs. Muus.

After that, I started reading up on the story, which turned out to have been a big deal back in 1880. But I didn’t have the full story until I read Muus vs. Muus: The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America, by Bodil Stenseth. I had had the impression that adultery was at the center of the scandal, but the real bone of contention turned out to be the one that remains the most common cause of marriage breakups today – money.

Bernt Julius Muus (pronounced “Moose”) and Oline Pind were not your average Norwegian immigrants. They did not come to America because of hard economic necessity; they came from privileged families. He felt called to minister to Norwegian Americans in the new country, and Oline felt called to be his helpmate.

They settled on the virgin prairie of Goodhue County, Minnesota, in the tiny settlement of Holden. Bernt, a hard man and a preacher of fiery sermons, worked tirelessly, not only to build his own congregation, but to plant churches all over the upper Midwest. In time he rose to be the first president of the Minnesota District of the conservative Norwegian Synod. Oline worked hard too, keeping the house, raising their children, filling in for her husband in practical matters of the congregation during his frequent absences.

Then, in 1879, she dropped a bombshell. She sued her husband for the money she had inherited from her father, which he had taken into his possession under Norwegian law. But they were in the U.S. now (though both Oline and Bernt remained Norwegian citizens) and she felt she should be able to control her own money as U.S. law permitted.

The matter might not have become a cause célèbre, though, if a document called “the Complaint” hadn’t been appended to the legal text. This document accused Pastor Muus of mental cruelty, neglect, and a stingy refusal to spend money on basic household necessities, to the point of damaging her and their children’s health.

Critics of the Norwegian Synod found this story irresistible. My people, the pietist Haugeans, who considered the Norwegian Synod papist and aristocratic (and were much more open to feminism than the Synod men), saw Bernt Muus as a power-hungry ecclesiastical tyrant. The men of the Lutheran Free Church, whose successors I worked for many years, supported Mrs. Muus after the divorce was finalized. Norwegian-American freethinkers, like Marcus Thrane whose comic opera “Holden” was performed in Chicago, used the case to attack orthodox Christianity itself. And nativist Americans were shocked by the bizarre goings on in an immigrant community which had so far made little effort to assimilate.

I was impressed with Muus vs. Muus. The story was well-told, and the translation very good. I expected a lot of heavy-handed feminist theory, but in fact (though the author’s sympathies are hardly concealed), the book does a pretty good job of being even-handed. I was impressed with the way the Holden congregation – within the strictures of its church rules, which did not allow a woman to address the congregation – went out of its way in many cases to be fair to Mrs. Muus.

I was also interested to see a lot of last names, like Finseth, Langemo, and Huset, that I knew well during my childhood in the area.

The book was marred by a mandatory, hypocritical land acknowledgement embedded in the editor’s afterword. But all in all, I was highly impressed by Muus vs. Muus. I recommend it for that (small, I’ll admit) audience interested in Norwegian-American history, especially church history.

Religion

What is the Word?

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Picture credit: aaronburden. Unsplash license.

Here’s a quotation that shows up on my Basefook feed from time to time:

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, which is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for curiosity or controversy) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

[From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume III, p. 246.]

Of course the person who posts this snippet feels that they’ve laid down a trump card – look here, you Bible-thumper! Even your hero C. S. Lewis didn’t think the Bible was the Word of God! What do you say to that?

All right, let’s talk about it.

First of all, I already knew Lewis wasn’t an inerrantist. This is not news. As I’ve often said, when a man is ten feet away from you, it makes all the difference in the world whether he’s walking toward you or away from you. Ten feet is almost here for the first, almost gone for the second. I think Lewis was walking toward me (us). That’s my subjective opinion, but a pretty well-informed one.

And of course, in an important sense, Lewis is entirely right. Christ is and always has been the uncreated Word of God, a Person of the Trinity: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1, ESV)

But I don’t think Lewis would have ever claimed that Christ was God’s Word in an exclusionary sense – that God could not also speak words that weren’t the Son. I’m pretty sure Lewis accepted that God had spoken all kinds of words – to the prophets, to visionaries, to the evangelists and apostles. I don’t think he’d have denied that the canon of Scripture is the inspired Word of God, while being distinct from the Person of Christ.

The question I always ask when I read this passage is, “Who is this Christ that you think you can find anywhere else than in the Bible?” If you quote the Lewis passage to argue that you have a Christ of your own who’s a little different than the one the Bible shows us, I think, frankly, that you’re worshiping yourself. And I suspect Lewis would agree.

If you spend time in the Bible, does it bring you closer to Christ, or further away? What better place is there to draw near to Him?

Now, Lewis was a sacramentalist (as I am, being a Lutheran). We believe that Christ is especially present in Holy Communion – that He comes to us in a physical way in and under the bread and wine. So I’ll stipulate to that as a place where we meet Him truly.

And Christ Himself emphasizes that we can also meet him in our neighbor – especially our neighbor who’s poor and sick and suffering. “And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:40)

So that’s most certainly true as well.

But where do I learn these things?

I learn them from Scripture.

It is my experience, and my observation, that any “Christ” that people talk about, who is separate from the Christ of Scripture, does not come from God.

Authors, Fiction

Another forgotten bestseller: Harold Bell Wright

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Well, I’m still moving slowly through the book I’m reading, my time monopolized by work, so I’ll follow up on last night’s post about Rose O’Neill with the story of another famous creative American who’s almost entirely forgotten today – and who also hung around Branson, Missouri. In fact it was this guy, Harold Bell Wright, who made Branson a center of tourism. Not intentionally.

Harold Bell Wright grew up in difficult circumstances, losing his parents at 11, and ended up in Ohio, working at various jobs. He studied for the ministry, and became a pastor in the non-denominational, non-creedal Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), taking a call in Pierce City, Missouri. He later served churches in Kansas and California.

He wrote a serialized story in 1902 that got printed, though he hated it, in a denominational magazine. His parishioners loved it, however, and so it was published as a book. His second novel was his breakthrough. The Shepherd of the Hills, set in the Branson, MO area, which he’d visited for his health, was published in 1907. It became a blockbuster bestseller – the first American novel to ever earn a million bucks. It has since been filmed four times, most notably with John Wayne starring in 1941. Other novels of his have also been turned into movies, notably The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926) with Ronald Coleman and Gary Cooper.

But today, chances are you’ve never heard of the man or his books. The reason for that is simple – he wasn’t a very good writer. (Owen Wister called one of his novels “a mess of mildewed pap.”)

Now as it happened, I acquired a copy of Shepherd of the Hills on my trip with my parents to Branson long ago, and I read it. As I recall, I found it entertaining and even inspirational, though a little stiff, as old books tend to be. However, it should be noted that my critical sense in those days was almost nonexistent. I aspired to be a writer, but I definitely wasn’t ready, because I couldn’t tell good writing from bad.

The Shepherd of the Hills is a highly moral tale. It tells a complicated story of mountain people who hold long-time grudges, which they are prepared to settle with blood until their hearts are softened by the spirit of forgiveness. In forgiveness they find peace.

Which is nice, as far as it goes. But it’s not a Christian tale in the sense of talking about Jesus or grace. It is assumed that the blessings of forgiveness flow from the world of the spirit in some sense, but it’s a matter (if I remember correctly) of people achieving their true moral stature rather than of their dying and rising again in Christ.

Wright’s church body was and is a pretty tolerant one in terms of doctrine, but still Wright quit the ministry (to make a much better living as a writer), declaring most congregational life hypocritical. His emphasis was on good works. That was well suited to the rising culture of America at the turn of the 20th Century – an emphasis on progress and self-help, with a sprinkling of Christianity on top, to taste.

I’ve seen the John Wayne movie of The Shepherd of the Hills. Its plot is radically altered and simplified from the book (it would pretty much have to be). It amused me that the film climaxed with John Wayne in a shootout – I guess the writers couldn’t resist that, though it’s not at all in the spirit of the book.

But, who cares? It’s not like the original material was a work of priceless art. Harold Bell Wright toiled in his time, and pleased most of his neighbors, and made a pile of money. His legacy is not his forgotten book, but the tourist mecca of Branson, Missouri, which he fathered unintentionally.

I wonder if he ever hung out with Rose O’Neill in Branson.

Uncategorized

Roses fade

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A random post tonight, drawing on my long and tedious life story. My reading is slowed right now by the fact that I’ve acquired a kind of a job, online. It’s a temporary one, but demands my time while I’ve got it. I may tell you about it, if I discover it’s okay with my employers.

Anyway, my memory wandered back, the other day, to a trip I took around 1978, when I was spending a year in Missouri (how and why is beside the point here). My parents came down from Minnesota to visit me, and we took a trip to the Ozarks. It was one of my first experiences relating to my parents as an adult, and weird for all kinds of reasons. My big interests were in visiting the Wilson’s Creek battlefield (an early Civil War battle at which both Wild Bill Hickok and Jesse James were present), and the Saunders Museum of Berryville, AK, which has a splendid collection of historical weapons. My parents dutifully accompanied me, but were more interested in the sights of Branson, which was just getting going as a tourist spot at the time.

We stopped at a couple places related to artists – we saw the open-air play based on Harold Bell Wright’s novel, The Shepherd of the Hills, which was once a world bestselling book – now almost forgotten. I ought to write something about Wright and his novel one of these days.

We also visited (I’m pretty sure this was Mom’s idea) Bonniebrook, the home of the artist Rose O’Neill (1874-1944), who was also a world-class celebrity in her time. (The song “Rose of Washington Square” from the movie of the same name, embedded above, is supposed to have been a tribute to her, although the movie’s based on the life of Fannie Brice). She is best remembered as a cartoonist and illustrator. She created the “Kewpie,” on which the kewpie doll is based. “Kewpie” is a diminutive for “Cupid.” The kewpies were cute, playful babies, inspired by the Cupids and cherubs of Renaissance art, only their wings were so vestigial you could hardly see them (which didn’t stop them flying, apparently). The kewpie doll was the first mass-produced doll, and it was bigger in its day than Cabbage Patch Kids or Tickle Me Elmo could ever hope to be.

Rose herself was a Nebraska native who moved to New York to pursue art. She became the first woman to ever have a comic strip published, and got to be rich and famous. She bought the Bonniebrook property in Missouri, where her father already lived, and spent the bulk of her earnings on her family there – plus her profligate first husband. But she herself did not live exactly modestly, and in time the kewpie doll fad receded, and her fortune (which had been huge) ran out. She retired to Missouri, where she died.

You can visit Bonniebrook today, as we did. I remember it as a large house full of art. I seem to recall they had a genuine Andrew Wyeth there, though my memory is not reliable. My mom bought a small ceramic kewpie of her own.

I guess the memory of that place got me thinking about fame. Even if you succeed as an artist in your own time (something I seem to have avoided), it doesn’t guarantee immortality in the eyes of man. When you think of famous artists or writers, there seems to be a lot of them, but there were multitudes you never heard of. Some were highly regarded by their contemporaries, but their work has been lost, or they fell out of favor with later generations.

Yet we all long not to be forgotten. I recall an old man somebody once brought along to a family gathering, when I was just a kid. I remember him sitting on my grandfather’s couch, tentative, melancholy, quiet. When the time came for him to leave, he came over to us kids and said, “Don’t forget me.”

We looked at him dully and said we wouldn’t.

And I haven’t.

But I have no idea who he was.

“For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.” (Hebrews 13:14)

Fiction, Reviews

‘I’ll Keep You Safe,’ by Peter May

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It had an atmosphere all of its own, that place. Sometimes mired in the mist that would drift in off the water on a still morning, or lost in the smirr that dropped down from the moor. I came into the loch once on a boat just as the sun was coming up, and mist like smoke rose up all around the lodge in the early-morning light, moving wraithlike among the trees. The water itself was alive with salmon breaking the still surface as they headed in from the sea on their journey upriver, and otters played around the stone slipway. It was magical.

I had not gotten far into reading Peter May’s I’ll Keep You Safe before I realized I’d read it before – even though I had just bought it on Amazon for the first time. Perhaps my previous reading was through a free giveaway, or perhaps I bought the paper version; all I know is I’ve reviewed it already, way back in 2018. Still, I’d forgotten how it came out, so I read on. With considerable pleasure.

Niamh and Ruairidh Macfarlane run a small tweed knitting company on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. It’s not the famous Harris Tweed, but a more refined fabric derived from it. They’ve made it through hard times to become big successes in the fashion world – some of the foremost designers in the business use their product. And they’re still very much in love.

They’re in Paris for an exhibition when Niamh gets an anonymous e-mail telling her Ruairidh is having an affair. She confronts him, and he walks away without explanation. A few minutes later, he’s dead. Niamh is devastated, lost and betrayed. The French police consider her a suspect.

When she’s allowed to take Ruaridh’s remains back home, she faces a hostile world. Both sets of their parents have always opposed their marriage. Lifelong friends turn against her. A French police woman is sent out to investigate her affairs. And she has a sense that someone is stalking her.

I note from my first review that I figured out whodunnit quite early on. Which amuses me, because I didn’t do that on this second reading. The story is told in a complex, non-sequential manner, with varying viewpoint characters, which is just confusing enough to keep the reader intrigued.

As always, one of Peter May’s greatest strengths is his scenic descriptions. One gets a vivid sense of the place – of the geology, the changeable, dangerous weather, the plants and wildlife. I greatly appreciate that quality, very much like taking a brief holiday in the islands.

Cautions are in order for language and some drug use, but I was intrigued to note (on this reading) that the book actually takes some very traditional moral views. That surprised me. Probably unintentional on the author’s part, but appreciated.

I highly recommend I’ll Keep You Safe – again. Women and men alike will enjoy it.

Uncategorized

Birgitta Wallace, 1934-2025

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I recently learned that the archaeologist Birgitta Wallace has died, aged 91. (She is featured in the Canadian video above, which is in English with French subtitles.)

Birgitta Wallace is memorable to the world for her outstanding work as chief archaeologist at the Viking site at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland (which I have visited, he mentioned casually).

She was the successor there to Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, the original discoverers of Viking artifacts at the site. Helge Ingstad was adamant throughout his career that the Vinland (“Wineland the Good”) of the sagas was the place he’d found in Newfoundland and nowhere else. He insisted – for some reason – that it was impossible that the Vikings could have gone anywhere else. “Stop looking. This is all there is,” was his message. The fact that no grapes have ever grown at that latitude did not trouble him – he considered the wine story pure fantasy.

Birgitta Wallace was less convinced. She noted that butternut shells were found in the excavations at L’Anse Aux Meadows, and butternuts also do not grow at that latitude. But they do grow at latitudes where grapes grow. She believed (and most historians today agree) that other Viking settlements very likely did exist in America. We just haven’t found them yet. We may never find them.

For me, Birgitta Wallace had the distinction of being about the most famous person I ever met personally. She spoke at the Chicago seminar on Vinland organized by Prof. Torgrim Titlestad back in 2010, which I attended. I walked up to her and told her I would like to be able to tell my friends I’d met her. We shook hands (very delicately; she was quite frail). It never occurred to me to take a selfie – I’m not in fact sure whether I even owned a phone with a camera in those days.

R.I.P. Birgitta Wallace.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Going Home In the Dark,’ by Dean Koontz

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…all in all, his condition was so pitiable that an extraordinary and inadvisable number of semicolons were required to connect the closely associated clauses describing it.

A Lutheran pastor appears as a villain in Dean Koontz’s latest novel, Going Home In the Dark. I think I can be confident that that pastor is a member of the Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless, because he’s committed to the extinction of the human race. (I don’t think that’s too big a spoiler. The guy isn’t the main villain.)

Dean Koontz likes to mix it up, style-wise. He can be dark and tragic; he can be deeply creepy and scary. He can even be funny, and he’s often quite good at that. He’s mostly going for funny (in a scary way) in Going Home In the Dark, and it works, I think… by and large.

The friends who call themselves the Four Amigos grew up as nerds and social outcasts in the midwestern town of Maple Grove (not the one just up the road from me, in Minnesota, I’m pretty sure). They all went on to be rich and famous – Rebecca is a movie star; Bobby is a bestselling novelist; Spencer is a renowned painter, and Ernie writes hit Country songs. Only Ernie still lives in town, near his cold and intimidating mother.

When Ernie is hospitalized in a coma, his friends rush to visit him – but are informed by his mother that he has died, just before their arrival.

Nevertheless, they are all convinced – irrationally but with certainty – that Ernie is not really dead. He’s in some kind of suspended animation. So they conspire to sneak his body out of the hospital and hide it so no one can embalm it before they figure out what’s going on.

Because something is going on. All three of them are suddenly recalling – all at the same time – strange events that happened when they were teenagers, memories they have suppressed until now. Why was the Lutheran pastor concealing half-formed, humanoid creatures in the church basement? Who was the monstrous giant they saw eating a man’s head in the park pavilion on Halloween? Also, why is Maple Grove – a town where the streets have names like Cunningham, Cleaver and Capra, so relentlessly friendly and utterly crime-free?

In spite of its horrific subject matter, the story is presented in a comic, self-parodying style. The unnamed narrator is always explaining why he tells us some things and ignores other things, undermining his stylistic effects by pointing them out. I did find it funny, and laughed more than once, though I thought Koontz was working it a little too hard this time.

However, the book’s conclusion did move me, which is the most important thing.

Not Koontz at his best, Going Home In the Dark is nevertheless a very entertaining book.