What to Read Next: The Heartland
Issue #338, featuring Hemingway, Krueger, and Stradal
Happy Friday, readers!
I’m writing this while staring out at Lake Superior, sun shining and huge ships approaching Duluth’s harbor. It’s incredible and has been one of our favorite getaways ever. Living in Colorado, we’ve forgotten how relaxing and grounding water can be.
But it’s been a strange week, hasn’t it? Last Friday, our family packed into the minivan and drove a dozen hours to the Midwest. On Saturday, former president Donald Trump came shockingly close to losing his life. Getting that news while on vacation gave the whole thing a strange sense of unreality — is this all real?
I originally had different plans for this week’s newsletter, but the combination of Great Lakes tranquility and the terrible political situation has me feeling just a little out of my usual writing groove. So today I’m going to share a few snippets of archived reviews of my favorite Midwest-focused books.
Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger
It’s been a while since I’ve read one, but William Kent Krueger’s series of murder mysteries set in Northern Minnesota hooked me from the start. Iron Lake, published in 1998, is the first of 19 (and counting) novels starring Cork O’Connor. In my original review from 2018 (I was just a few months into writing this newsletter), I wrote:
Given his name, Cork is obviously part Irish, but he's also part Native American, and once resided as Sheriff of a small northern Minnesota town called Aurora. (Turns out the town really exists, but there aren't too many similarities.) . . . Over the course of the series Cork finds his way into a bunch of mysterious happenings not just around the town, but all over northern MN.
I read Iron Lake on Tuesday in pretty much one sitting . . . I just couldn't stop turning the pages. . . . it was far higher quality than I've come to expect from the genre. Rather than just each page driving the plot forward with cliched and easy-to-spot turns of events, Krueger really transports you to life in northern Minnesota — the lakes and woods, the blending of cultures, the harsh weather. As a native Minnesotan, I loved that part of it.
I’ve only read seven books in the series, but being here in Duluth has freshly inspired me to read more of them (especially since I just wrapped up the Gamache series).
The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal
Few books have ever so wholesomely transported me home like J. Ryan Stradal’s The Lager Queen of Minnesota. In part, that’s because Stradal is actually from Hastings, which is also where I’m from. He spent a lot of time at Spiral Brewery learning about the brewing trade. Last week, when I visited that downtown Hastings taproom for the first time, I was reminded of how much I loved The Lager Queen.
When I went looking for my original review of this one, I couldn’t find it — only to realize I never actually gave it a full review. Oh well. Sometimes I skip writing about my very favorite books, keeping them to myself for a bit longer than I usually would. I did write this about it, though, in recapping some of my favorite reads of ‘22:
The setting (including my home town!), the unforgettable characters, the passion for beer . . . it all made for that rare story that I actually wanted 100 more pages of. I don’t hesitate to recommend this book to anyone and everyone, which is another rarity.
It’s also worth reading my interview with Stradal, which is delightfully Midwestern, even though we both now live in the West.
The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway
I first encountered Hemingway’s famous Nick Adams stories when I read In Our Time (1925), his first collection, in 2019. Those stories have now been collected into their own volume, called The Nick Adams Stories, which heavily feature the upper midwest’s great outdoors. Here’s what I wrote five years ago:
About half the stories feature the character Nick Adams — perhaps the most autobiographical protagonist that Hemingway ever wrote. These stories were particularly enjoyable for me; they feature Nick as a young boy, and then man, who has grown up the Midwest, chasing outdoor pursuits, with an interlude of war experience tossed in.
"Big Two-Hearted River," in particular, featured such vivid descriptions of Nick's fly fishing outing that I was damn near sure I could smell the fish while sitting in an adirondack chair on my front porch. There's underlying meaning to the story, sure, but it's really just about Nick enjoying the outdoors and recuperating. It made me want to go fishing(!), which is not a feeling I often have.
Thanks so much for the time and inbox space. I deeply appreciate it.
-Jeremy
I assume you're focusing on non-urban lit, so anything set in Chicago or other large cities is out. With that in mind, a few recommendations from me:
"Peace" by Gene Wolfe. He's famous for SF, but this is a literary (but strange) novel, very evocatively set in a small Illinois town. Some have called it a ghost story, but what's going on here is very open to interpretation.
"Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson. The original, classic small-town short-story collection, influential on a whole bunch of writers.
And a perhaps surprising third - "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel. Seems to be acquiring modern classic status, and most of the action takes place around the Great Lakes (on both sides of the border).
I'm generally a Hemingway fan, but I tried and failed to get into this Nick Adams stories, and started and stopped at Big Two-Hearted River. I'm a pretty outdoorsy guy, but fishing(?), not so much. It was great writing, but I didn't take the bait I guess.
I'll have to try out Nick O'Connor and your rec on Stradal. Nonfiction that focuses on "small" events and places often has an outsized impact.