“An American Memory” is about the grip of the past and the great cost of the struggle to be free of it; here, that cost entails grief, paralysis, and madness. It covers a time roughly approximating the last century. Eric Larsen’s narrative is composed of short, discrete passages, sometimes a page long, sometimes less. These are arranged into a series of twelve self-contained episodes told mostly by Malcolm Reiner, a young man of Norwegian heritage who grows up in a town called West Tree, Minn. He relates the history of his family, beginning with his grandparents and continuing into the present of his own life.

Malcolm’s paternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor and missionary of national consequence. His eldest son and namesake, Harold (Malcom’s father), rebels inwardly against everything his father represents, especially his faith. The pastor dies of pneumonia brought on by a strenuous mission to eastern Europe, and the teenaged Harold returns with his family to the Midwest, to West Tree (the pastor had led an important congregation in New York). Young Harold sees the move as his final liberation from his father’s oppressive ghost. Larsen suggests a little of that burden in noting that the family is still dressed in mourning at the time of their trip—three years after the pastor’s death.

Harold marries the prettiest girl in town and they settle down in West Tree. Malcolm’s mother is the only child of two thwarted actors who run West Tree’s movie theater. She is a sheltered girl brought up to fear almost everything, not least the histrionic passions of her own parents; at 13, she looks on as her father levels a pistol at her mother in a jealous rage. She and Harold are bound by “the sense, not closely examined but shared by them both as their greatest and most intimate secret, that within his lay the promise for greatness.”

But Harold’s vision of freedom from the past dissolves, as does his promise. He takes up photography, writing, and innumerable hobbies, but all are eventually discarded. Malcolm interprets his father’s life as dedicated to nothing less than surpassing time, to finding some way to escape his own suppressed personal history. The farmhouse he buys, “a graveyard of symbol,” is maintained in a stage of meticulously preserved rustification—another token, like his photos and writing, of his efforts to evoke and then somehow capture life in a state of idyll. But what he has buried within himself—the unresolved passions he feels about his family and heritage—ultimately paralyzes him. He never leaves West Tree except for a few years of service in World War II.

Distinguished by its clarity, gravity, and elegance, Larsen’s prose style is the book’s greatest virtue. Two chapters are written in the voices of Malcolm’s sisters, Ingie and Hannah, and they feature that style at its best, particularly Hannah’s, an account of the family on summer holiday at Lake Superior that achieves a hallucinatory beauty. These chapters come as something of a relief from Malcolm’s voice, which at times seems almost too self-involved, too precious, as in the passages from his “notebook” that divide some of the chapters. The book’s flaws stem from the same source as its strengths—the author’s obsessive preoccupation with his subject.

When Malcolm comes of age he attempts to escape his past in a more conventional way, by leaving and coming back as rarely as possible. He returns after his father’s death for a brief visit redolent with repressed grief and anger. Buried in him now are not only his own struggle with his father but also with his grandfather, as well as the legacy of violent passion left by his mother’s parents. He is gripped with the sort of fear that afflicted his mother, fear of physical harm as it might be visited by chance on beloved children—the fear born of love and powerlessness.

Malcolm Reiner’s narrative becomes his attempt at reclamation and recovery, the means of discovering the substance of both his ancestors’ lives and his own, and resolving their three generations of miscarried hope. It is an essay at overcoming what’s lost to time and silence, and it is not an unsuccessful one.

This is a serious, worthy novel, and of how many among the countless put out each year can that be truly said? It is Larsen’s first book. Judging from the copyright dates of sections that previously appeared in periodicals, he has been assembling it for at least the last eight years. With its publication he exhibits a weight and accomplishment uncommon to first novelists.

Bittersweet homage: Eric Larsen’s ‘An American Memory’ is delicate, poetic fiction

By Mary Ann McKinley

Panning a stream of first novels a reviewer occasionally finds a golden nugget. Eric Larsen’s first novel is one of those. As delicately and sweetly written as a lullaby, it comes as close to poetry as fiction can get.

An American Memory is the saga of three generations of a plains family from the regions of Iowa and Minnesota. The story is told primarily from the viewpoint of a son of the third generation, Malcolm Reiner, a man in his 30s. Malcolm Reiner’s special interest in investigating his family is a need to understand his father, the enigmatic character around whom the other characters in this tale dance in macabre homage.

Malcolm begins his investigation with his maternal grandparents and their only child, a daughter—the girl his father marries, Malcolm’s mother. The grandfather is a cinema owner in a Minnesota town. The grandmother is a strong-willed wife, whose husband once comes near to shooting her, and an overprotective mother, whose daughter grows up possessed by many unreasonable fears, Malcolm notes. Ironically, as his probes continue, Malcolm develops similar fears.

His quest takes the reader next to Malcolm’s paternal grandparents and their family, of whom his father, Harold, is the eldest child. Malcolm digs through a biography of his father’s father as well as letters and diaries to piece together his father’s childhood. The young investigator comes to the conclusion that his father detested his grandfather. An ultra-strict disciplinarian, the grandfather was a Norwegian immigrant, minister and pillar of the Christian church. When the Rev. Reiner dies prematurely and his family moves from New York back to their homeland in the Midwest, his son casts aside the restrictions the minister imposed in the name of good-Christianism.

As a result, Malcolm comes to see that his father, the minister’s son, went to the opposite extreme. In a trunk in the attic he finds clothing, photographs and memorabilia of Harold’s, which portray a 1920s-style, Fitzgeraldish dandy, a lover of fancy clothes and cars, of alcohol and cigarettes. Probably his father’s ultimate rebellion against the bare-bones, plain, prayerful home he grew up in was aesthetic, however. He decides to become an artist, to devote his life to nature photography—a big step for a minister’s boy.

Harold does become a professional photographer for a while. Failing at that he becomes a farmer. And failing at farming he (inexplicably—there’s never a mention of advanced degrees) becomes a college teacher. Throughout he is a heavy drinker and smoker—in spite of a chronic cough—and generally given to compulsive behavior. As the years and careers go by, he develops a sense of failure, which translates into anger and displeasure.

“My father was a symbol, his origins shrouded in obscurity and mystery, his dominance absolute and not to be questioned. Most notable about him was his displeasure. . . It seems to me now that life on the farm has as its deepest regulating principle the avoiding of that displeasure; the moments of gaiety or lightness that occurred were the moments of unexpected and temporary release from its threat.”

Through Malcolm’s eyes, and those of his two sisters, we see the pain and fear that ruled the lives of those who lived with and loved this man. The soul-searching pain and fear in the end contribute to psychiatric problems for Malcolm.

The novel has a bittersweet taste of truth, and hence a powerful emotional pull. Larsen conjures scene after scene with deft strokes that lead the reader to want to savor them. One sister recalls:

“The family has lunched together on broiled trout caught from the lake, a loaf of fresh bread warm from the oven, sliced cucumbers in dill-flavored vinegar, red garden tomatoes. Now, following lunch, comes the quietest moment of the day. . . . The dishes are done, the linens folded, the back door has been propped open with a wedge of pine. . . . My mother and grandmother sit at the red checkered tablecloth playing a game of canasta. My grandfather. . . . listening to the quiet drone of a baseball game from somewhere five hundred miles away. My father has locked himself into the guest cabin. . . Malcolm and Ingie are down on the shore, playing a game in which they pretend to see bears swimming in from the lake.”

An American Memory is, of course, the archetypical story of a young man’s search of his own identity in that of his father. Larsen’s narrator is compelled by a gnawing fear that his father did not love him and that he may not have loved his father. The reader is never really sure what Malcolm’s conclusion is. The novel is written, however, with such love and care, and with such an autobiographical sense, it seems the answer is in itself.

Into the Heart of the Continent
By Dinitia Smith

Eric Larsen’s first novel takes us by surprise. Initially, it appears to be simply a memoir of a Midwestern family, written in the plain, spare language of, say, Wright Morris’s early work, with its images of small-town life, of faded clapboard barns, of individuals cast against the great space of the plains. But as the novel unfolds, Mr. Larsen’s true agenda becomes apparent—to describe the descent into madness of a man engaged in an obsessive search for the meaning of his father’s life.

The novel’s principal narrator is Malcolm Reiner, who is in his 30’s. A member of a prominent Lutheran family, Malcolm grows up on a remote farm in Minnesota, the son of a man who is an amateur photographer and an intellectual, an angry, arrogant figure who is helplessly unable to show his children love.

“An American Memory” is as much a prose poem as a novel, with 12 chapters, each divided into stanza-like sections, each a haunting and exactly rendered word picture, an image of the past that survives to torment and preoccupy Malcolm. “In spite of our better judgment and without hope of success,” he says, “we find ourselves attempting to imagine, recapture, seize again the exact moment in abandoned, echoless, irretrievably lost time when the eye of the doomed photographer saw precisely what we now see.”

As the book proceeds, we hear, successively, the stories of Malcolm’s grandparents, parents and siblings, each story moving back and forth in time. Slowly, the form of the novel evolves, from a relatively straightforward description of events at the beginning, to mere fragments of interspersed episodes, bits of a religious pamphlet, passages that begin or end in mid-sentence, parodies of psychological cant.

There are many Joycean echoes in the novel—for example, of the catechism section in “Ulysses.” Describing his father’s journey westward after the death of his own father, Malcolm asks: “What, during his journey into the heart of the continent, had my father seen from the windows of the train? He had seen the remarkable and exhilarating absence of his father, translated into the openness, freedom, and grandeur of the country. Crystalline sunlight.”

Family stories, moments of violence, stay in Malcolm’s mind forever, sometimes take on a dangerous intensity—a story about his maternal grandfather threatening his grandmother with a pistol during a jealous fight; his father in the barn kicking the animals in a fit of rage. Malcolm is one of those children who are unusually affected by the events of life, a child whom shadows threaten to drown.

He hides for hours in the family attic, listing the contents of his father’s trunks and suitcases, trying on his father’s old clothes, “devoting a single day to the wearing of each. . . . I would get, if possible, inside my father.” Toward the end of the novel, the scene shifts to New York, where Malcolm’s narrative reaches its logical conclusion, perhaps, in his mental breakdown. “There are knives in the house, sharp things, hammers,” he tells his wife. He is hospitalized and then begins “the gentle tedium of slow repair.”

The novel ends with the narrator walking his children in New York City, far from the plains, the swirling and tapering snow, the sun on a lake—yet he is content. “My daughter’s arms are raised above her head. Her face is thrown back in laughter. Her small legs, having pushed her upward, have not yet returned to the earth.” These redemptive passages are not so powerful as those depicting Malcolm’s pain; the characters of his mother and sisters and wife not so vividly drawn as those of Malcolm and his father.

On the whole, “An American Memory” is a beautiful work. Mr. Larsen, who teaches English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has written this novel in language as sparse and wind-riven as the Midwest of his imagination, “a frozen wilderness that reached outward to the low circle of the horizons,” in which only the very strong, capable of fearing great loneliness, can endure.

A tale of emotions on troubling levels
AN AMERICAN MEMORY, by Eric Larsen
By Richard Smith

“They did not quarrel. There was not the drama of raised voices in the night. My father did not abandon my mother. There was no violence between them. Very little happened; not enough for a story.”

Yet out of this material, Eric Larsen fashions a striking first novel—a brilliant depiction of the emotional rigidness and thwarted ambitions that seem endemic to isolated Midwestern towns.

An American Memory begins with the narrator recalling a time in his early 30s when memories of family members who’d died began to overwhelm him, eventually precipitating a breakdown. This reconstruction of his parents’ and grandparents’ unhappy lives is not, then, idle speculation: laying these ghosts to rest is essential to his own survival.

Especially troubling is his father, who in his childhood had lived in secret rebellion against his own father, a sanctimonious minster, whose death proved traumatic. The boy felt joy, guilt, and “the terror. . . that he himself, in the death of his father, had also died.”

These contradictory emotions, never resolved, became lifelong liabilities. For a time, the narrator’s father almost succeeded in creating a romanticized external life to counter-balance the chaos within him: He fancied himself destined for artistic greatness and adventures abroad, and spent his time writing stories and taking photographs.

Supporting this dream was his wife, the narrator’s mother, a beautiful but cripplingly fearful woman. Briefly, these two grown-up, maladjusted children maintained an unreal “drama of beginnings: an extended season of summer.”

But then they had children of their own, which changed everything. The young parents proved too fragile to cope with the flux and loss of real life and the tensions latent in the father began to uncoil.

Alone with his family on their farm, he subjected his wife and children to a steady barrage of virulence and scorn.

Much about this novel is extraordinary—the elegant prose, the meticulous descriptions of winters on the farm and of the father’s coldness. Larsen doesn’t fake melo-dramatic events, but instead remains true to the subdued tones characteristic of such an emotionally restrained family.

And he never lets the narrator lapse into self-pity. The tone throughout is compassionate rather than accusatory.

Interestingly, Larsen places the father within a historical context—the lineage of the Midwest’s “devout, tall, taciturn patriarchs.” What do these men do with their energies and passions when there is no more frontier to settle and no more religion to believe in?

The narrator’s father found no answer, and that failure destroyed him. But the narrator, in scrutinizing this heritage, seems to bring about some sort of healing in himself, thereby—one hopes—making possible for his own c

Cold Heritage Of A Brooding Father
By Clarence E. Olson

The cold and brooding father is a chilling image in this evocative first novel. The story covers three generations in which a pattern is repeated: Distant, intellectually brutal men are married to complaisant women who never question or challenge their overbearing husbands, men who carry with them the burden of disappointment or who smother their humanity under a cloak of righteous authority, men who show no love for their children and instill in them instead a lasting fear. The novel has the feel and mood—and some of the difficulty—of an Ibsen play.

The father of Malcolm, the narrator, had reveled in his wartime experience in the U.S. Navy, and he continued afterwards to long for “something eventful and dramatic to enter his life again.” But he makes plans for trips that never materialize, he rushes into new hobbies—gold, hunting, photography—only to drop them when his enthusiasm wanes, he talks about his big plans only to take routine jobs and to fail as a farmer. This combination of festering dreams and a lingering bitterness toward his own dead father, an ambitious cleric, make him totally unresponsive to his own children.

“An American Memory” is also an evocation of life in a small Minnesota community with its durable Scandinavian descendants, its harsh but exhilarating weather, its concentration on family and neighborhood values. But the aloof father dominates every incident in the book, casting a pall over even the seemingly happy events, giving the lyrical passages a sense of doom rather than joy.

In the middle of the book a single sentence, an italicized question from an unnamed source, hints that the entire narrative may be part of Malcolm’s own therapy, an attempt to exorcise the narcissistic self-hatred that is being passed from father to son.

The adult Malcolm is bothered by guilt, by the unresolved hate he feels for his father long after the father’s death. Malcolm had been traveling in Europe when his father died, and he managed to avoid returning for the funeral—does not return home, in fact, for two years. In the end, when he has married and escaped to New York, he is hospitalized because of his wildly irrational fears of what might happen to his own children—and, the reader surmises, what he might do to them.

Eric Larsen writes in mesmerizing manner, in a fractured and faceted style that is both intriguing and, at times, frustrating in its relentless concentration on mood and mystery. As in Ibsen’s plays, Larsen’s writing displays a dark, Nordic spirit at work. Occasionally, the symbolism and Larsen’s oblique style are apt to leave the reader bewildered.

In one chapter, a seemingly simple event is retold in several slightly altered versions—as though the author were rewriting the scene trying to get it right. The effect is dreamy and surrealistic.

The reader is left, finally, with a powerful image of a difficult father-son relationship, of one young man’s search through his own memories for the answers to that most intriguing puzzle—himself.

Powerful novel explodes myth of the American West
By James Marshall

Eric Larsen’s An American Memory is not everyone’s nostalgic bash. Despite the implications of its title, it is not a pleasant journey into the memorable past of the American history book, nor does it lead the reader into an Edenic and pristine past of moral rectitude and the vigorous independence of the West

It is, however, the work of a fresh and powerful new talent. Larsen’s narrative focuses on a father-son relationship, on an attempt by the son to understand the father in order to understand himself. The son—Malcolm Reiner—becomes a victim of the encroaching darkness of psychosis; when he is cured of his illness he becomes liberated from his family and from forces of American history—forces that have crippled the fathers and sons of four generations of the Reiner family.

When Malcolm’s father takes over a farm, within a few years it grows rank and fallow. Malcom struggles to inherit the family farm, and thus to reclaim the family identity. The farm becomes a symbol of the course of history: The American West as the region of freedom has become an illusion that obstructs the growth of the individual and his society.

Larsen also uses other voices, including the writings of Malcolm’s stern Victorian-American great-grandfather, a sequestered, culturally abandoned Norwegian immigrant. His writings make for an ironic, comic contrast with Malcolm’s own notebooks.

Larsen’s narrative technique may at first seem a puzzling barrier to understanding. The conventional devices of dialogue and progressive scenes have been replaced by the post-modernist method of multiple perspectives. This may be analogous to Picasso’s cubist figures who appear monstrous at first, but who on study ultimately assume a form and shape as a result of the unusual and various perspectives. Larsen’s “silences” offer moments that hold time in suspension while Malcolm finds a greater but still incomplete understanding of this father.

Symbol of the past

At one point the mirror on an old bureau, a symbol of the Reiner family past, falls and shatters into fragments and we recognize that all perspectives, however varied, will not provide the one magic key to the past, or to Malcolm’s thwarted but seeking self. The past, family history and perhaps history itself, cannot be whole and complete. Fragments, or perspectives, are all the mind can grasp.

Larsen’s title would seem to hold the key to the puzzle: Since the past, the memory of it, lies in scattered fragments, only the acceptance of the dynamic flow of life and its changes relieves the isolation, whether for the immigrant of past generations or for the contemporary narrator.