In his second novel, The Lighthouse Road (after Safe from the Sea), Minneapolis novelist Peter Geye introduced the Norwegian immigrant Eide family living in Minnesota's Lake Superior town of Gunflint. Wintering continues the saga of the Eides' next generation, beginning as the elder, dementia-stricken Harry Eide wanders off one day into the wilderness to the north. Prompted by Harry's disappearance, his middle-aged son, Gus, thinks back to the winter when he was 18 and joined his father on a long canoe trek to the same Canada/Minnesota borderlands of the Laurentian Divide. Like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, the imaginative Lake Superior north shore of Geye's three novels is a world of its own--colorful, provincial and buttoned-up.
Wintering's narrator, Berit Lovig--Harry's late-in-life lover, long-time local postmistress, and for 40 years the caretaker of Gus's reclusive, cantankerous grandmother--knows much of Gunflint's complicated history. She tells Gus, "This town has always been good at having secrets, and terrible at keeping them." As Gus tells his story to Berit and she tells hers to him, Geye's assured narrative gradually unfolds a Jack London-like tale of survival blended with a Richard Russo-like picture of small-town intrigue.
Gus's memory of the uncharted lands far beyond the Devil's Maw rapids is at the center of Wintering, but Berit's perspective on her own past and that of the other immigrants arriving at Gunflint's port is an equally compelling history of patience and endurance. Geye dips into history with ease and comes out with a story as contemporary as anything flashing across our screens today. Wintering is a novel for the ages. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.