4 minute read
Lit Du Nord: Minnesota Books and Authors
from Mankato Magazine
By Nick Healy
A family’s rise and fall
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As Peter Geye’s latest novel opens, the main character, who lately has been experiencing problems with memory and mood, relives a sensation he experienced when long ago he was a ski jumper of great skill and promise. What surfaces in Jon Bargaard’s dream is not a memory of competitive trial or triumph, as one might expect in a tale about an aging athlete. Rather, Jon’s subconscious conjures an almost magical sensation that was revealed to him only through the sport that once filled him with zeal.
His father, who taught him to ski jump, had mentioned “the stall,” and Jon recalls it as the midair “moment when you reached the perfect position, when control and calmness met and the speed vanished and you were no longer flying but only suspended there.”
It's a lovely image and an indelible bit of insight from an author who knows his material intimately, one who is writing from experience, as Geye is here. It also functions perfectly in the novel because, as the story begins, the protagonist is hurtling toward a rough landing. In his life, ease and control will become only the stuff of dreams.
“The Ski Jumpers” is Geye’s fifth novel, and it’s every bit as engaging and sometimes arresting as his best work, including “Northernmost,” which was released in 2020 and led William Kent Krueger to describe Geye as “the William Faulkner of the North Country.” That book concluded a trilogy of novels (with “The Lighthouse Road” and “Wintering”) that stood alone but combined to depict the long, complex and rocky history of the Eide family on the North Shore.
In his new book, Geye plays a bit with his own biography
“The Ski Jumpers” by Peter Geye
and with his earlier stories. The book’s narrator is a novelist in his 50s. He’s been unable to finish a manuscript about his youth as a standout ski jumper and about his father, younger brother and the trouble that disrupted all of their competitive ambitions.
“The Ski Jumpers” is more a family drama than a sports story. It’s mostly about two generations of Bargaards and it explores ways that mistakes and trespasses of long ago can put several generations under pressure, can drive a wedge between people who don’t even know the truth of what happened in the past, what put them into their current situations.
Hours after waking from his dream of peace and calm in flight, Jon receives grim news from his doctor. The diagnosis is younger-onset Alzheimer’s, and he leaves the doctor’s office with perhaps a couple of years left to set some things straight and to sort out unfinished business before his memories are lost to him.
From there, the novel follows Jon through one day, as he and his wife, Ingrid, leave their home in Duluth on a road trip that will end at their daughter’s cabin deep in the North Woods. Jon has something to tell his wife, something he has kept secret for as long as he has known her.
Geye builds tension by moving around in time, puzzling together the stories of the narrator, his parents, his brother and how the past caught up with all of them. Because of the way the story is framed — looking back from the day of the diagnosis — some tension might be lost, but Geye is a sure hand when it comes to keeping the reader curious and uncomfortable.
He also creates a lot of beauty on the page through language that is often musical and images that are often memorable. In this book, he brings readers into a little-known subculture and shows them the unfamiliar world of a sport many observers might think belongs to people who are as reckless as they are fearless.
Geye writes brilliantly about the action of ski jumping and the mix of fear and wonder young athletes encounter. Consider, for example, a moment when the protagonist watches his younger brother soar and sees who is truly the promising one in the family.
“Go, I thought, but before the thought was finished Anton kicked into the tracks,” Geye writes. “Surely what followed him down the inrun was the snow blown up out of the tracks and not some celestial contrail of stardust and heavenly
spirit. What attended his leap was not the ringing of bells but only my own lips pierced in a whistle.”
“The Ski Jumpers” will be published Sept. 13 by the University of Minnesota Press, just as a presumably brief Minnesota autumn begins and another long winter looms. The book makes a worthy read regardless of the season.
Nick Healy is an author and freelance writer in Mankato.
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