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Great Midwestern Novel, an epic tale of sinewy people wrestling with the land, and enduring privation and blizzards. A guy who comes from silent people, as I do—my ancestors were fishermen who spoke rarely so as not to alarm the walleyes—is not going to write social comedy. I have no ear for dialogue.
    “So how’s it going then?” they would say.
    “Oh, not so bad, I guess. How’s it with you then?” they would reply.
    I went at the GMN and accumulated a pile of yellow paper containing thousands of words about the Petersons, a heroic family descended from ship captains, their odyssey to Minnesota, their struggles and privations.
    “We’ll keep going,” said Olaf. He did not look at Solveig. He could not bear to see the emptiness in her large blue eyes. “Why?” she said softly. She touched his arm as if to restrain him from walking out the door and through the howling blizzard to the barn where the horses stood, waiting to pull the sleigh to Fargo to meet the train bringing the union organizer from Minneapolis. “Because it is who we are,” he said. “Can’t you see? You and I can never realize our dreams without a strong Farmer Labor Party. If I die, you lose your Olaf, but if the party dies, then we lose each other, all of us.”
    Sometimes late at night I walked out the back door and looked at the flashing 1 and thought, “O, St. Paul, Maker of Scotch Tape, Mail Handler, Insurance Underwriter, Player with the Nation’s Commercial Cleaning Compounds, City of the Swollen Ankles, let this boy write a novel that earns millions of dollars and is made into a movie and I’ll never ask another favor as long as I live, I promise you.
     
     
     
    I told my old classmate Katherine that I prayed to the First National Bank and she wrote a poem:
    The man
    In his
    Garden
    Worships the
    One
    In the
    Sky
    Of the Bank
    Of Our First
    Nation.
    She was one of the literati of our university crowd, a little wisp of a thing, like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, her mouth in a perpetual 0. She stood up at Frank’s thirty-fifth birthday party and everyone hushed and she recited in her tiny breathless voice
    Isometric circus
    Of the mailbox.
    My
    Friend
    Is 35.
    Audacious Apennines!
    We rise to
    An Acropolis
    of sensuous
    Forces.
    Two eggs,
    Refractory embryos
    Of the
    Future.
    And then everyone was obliged to clap.
    I thought: God, if I have to be a nobody in St. Paul, at least let me be smarter than Katherine.
    The party was at the University Club, around the pool. A big band, waiters with traps of champagne, a sit-down dinner for fifty, fricasseed squab and lobster, very fancy. The big hot dog.
    “I hear you had a story in The New Yorker, Larry,” she said to me, not admitting to having read the thing, just that she’d heard about it, but she trembled as she said it: to Minnesota writers, getting published in The New Yorker was like dating Natalie Wood. It definitely set you apart.
    “Frank is working on another novel,” Iris said. “Good for him,” I said. “He has such a gift,” said Katherine. “There’s something almost mythic about it.”
    One night I sat bolt upright, jolted awake. A premonition. The house was still. The light on the cathedral dome was not burning. Why? Why dark? A car door closed. Voices. A woman and a man. Iris slept, curled like a cat, snoring gently, her headphones beside her on the pillow, a tinny metallic voice talking about the death of God. I picked it up. The BBC World Service. A shortage of cod. Off Newfoundland. Speculation by codologists about sun spots, radio waves.
    I went to the window. A cop car cruised by. Next door, Mr. Ziegler sat at his kitchen table, a glass of whiskey in his hairy fist. He was one of those men who should never ever go around without a shirt, and there he sat, doughy, big-breasted, weeping. According to Iris, who visited him from time to time, he had retired from Woolworth and now whiled away his hours clipping newspaper articles, marching in Civil War