NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
July 6, 2000
Larry Woiwode, arguably the most distinguished author in the history of North Dakota and winner of the 1992 Roughrider Award, remains a cipher to most people--even most serious readers--on the northern plains. His fiction is dense; its plots are blurred, sometimes double-exposed, and the very artfulness of his prose taxes any reader determined to get the full benefit of every passage. His critically acclaimed work, published with New York houses, is not much read in his home state.
Many self-consciously literary people don't know what to do with Woiwode, either, because he is a fundamentalist Christian. When an author says he prays, they get uncomfortable. (It's surprising how many folks assume all artists of merit must be liberal and agnostic.) On the other hand, some Christians criticize him because he puts things in his books that they think are not Christian. (It's surprising, too, how many folks never seem to have read the Old Testament.)
It's been a while since Woiwode, a resident of rural Mott, N.D., has had a new book out. Now he has two. A biography of Bismarck businessman Harold Schafer, "Aristocrat of the West," is published by the Institute for Regional Studies, North Dakota State University--but that's not the book I want to talk about here. I'm thinking now of "What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts," published by Basic Books.
The title plays on that of Woiwode's first novel (1969), "What I'm Going to Do, I Think." Woiwode’s latest book is a memoir, sort of, telling the story, or rather stories, of the author's life up to publication of "What I'm Going to Do, I Think." Regional readers can find out something about his boyhood and the death of his mother in Sykeston, N.D., and also how he and wife Carole moved back to North Dakota (but to the West River, a farm near Mott) in 1978.
Literary folk will be particularly interested in how his career was influenced and nurtured by two individuals: Charles Shattuck, a professor at the University of Illinois, and William Maxwell, an editor at the New Yorker.
For star power, there is also the story of Woiwode's friendship with the actor's actor, Robert De Niro. This friendship makes more sense than you might think; both have their demons.
"What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts" is not going to make its author any friends among chamber-of-commerce publicists in his home state. It is told from the vantage of North Dakota in the winter of 1996-97--remember that one? I made a pheasant hunt to Mott after the first blizzard that winter, when already the deer were living in the haystacks, and the pheasants had taken up residence in pit silos, the lucky ones.
His narrative moves back and forth between the story of his literary rise in the 1960s and the chronicle of his winter survival in 1997. Woiwode has the idea of heating his home and office-building (a converted granary) with a wood-burning furnace that sits outside and supplies hot water heat to the buildings. The results are not good.
There are two things I love about the winter-survival aspect of the book. First, Woiwode does some really dumb things, the sort of things I might do, and it makes me feel better when he admits them. Second, he is pitilessly honest. He speaks of heroic neighbors and uncharitable ones, and he lets winter have its way. It may be impossible to transport readers elsewhere into the jaws of a northern plains winter, but Woiwode comes close, at least I think he did.
Now I'm going to put this book away for two years and then read it again. By that time the images in it--that ravenous furnace, that bloody splotch on the carpet, that snow-snaked road--will mean different things to me, and probably to Woiwode, too.
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NDSU Agriculture Communication
Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136