Nelsestuen offers a group portrait of suburban neighbors in crisis in this literary novel.

In the Minneapolis suburb of Eagles Pond, a group of longtime, mostly white, middle-aged neighbors—“normally private, feigning an outgoing nature with close, warm-hand touches woman-to-man on the shoulder, or maybe a brief rub of the back”—has been socializing more and more. For Peter Jensen, whose wife left him a year and a half ago, the parties are an opportunity to gaze longingly at his female neighbors, particularly the younger lesbian couple who recently moved in. Now that he’s been forced into early retirement by the closing of his office, Peter has more than enough time for his fantasies to get him into trouble. His neighbor Jerry’s wife has also left, and, in the depths of self-pity, Jerry is considering making a pass at Margaret, a neighbor recently widowed by cancer. Meanwhile, local blowhard Leroy Thompson operates a box factory and is in the midst of being audited by the IRS. It’s an open secret that his attractive wife, the matchmaker Charlene, has cheated on him, though the couple’s centrality to the social circle keeps people from whispering too openly about it. Jerry claims that all of the neighbors are unhappy, which may well be true. But to what extent are each of them willing to blow up their lives (and the lives of others) for a shot at something better? Nelsestuen evokes the midlife disappointments and anxieties of his characters with great subtlety and empathy, refusing to allow even the most ridiculous of them to slide into caricature. Here, Jerry laments his inability to fix his lawnmower: “As a youth, he’d kept his sixty-four Falcon going for nearly 150,000 miles. But sometime after he finished college, he’d lost touch as the world switched to electronic ignition, fuel injection and a plethora of computer chips.” Though the narrative never becomes as explosive as the reader might expect, it offers relatable, pitiable humanity on every page.

An affecting tragi-comic portrait of white suburban dissatisfaction.

A melancholic lawyer struggling with depression and regret considers an invitation to make an illegal fortune in Nelsestuen’s novel.

Winston Williamsen III never wanted to be a lawyer—in fact, he wanted to be a writer, but his imperious father put an end to that aspiration and forced him into the family business. Winston has been the managing partner of their firm for 15 years; his father, now 86 years old, is sliding into dementia. Winston’s wife, Shirley, is dying from a cancer that “that slowly eats her with each heartbeat,” but that doesn’t curb his chronic infidelity, marital transgressions of which she is aware but studiously avoids discussing. Winston is a man exhausted by sadness and remorse, his self-worth all but forfeited when he was caught destroying evidence to protect a client in a misstep he only survived professionally because of his father’s influence. He’s presented with an opportunity to make millions of dollars by a client, Samuel Armstor, the controller of RoneCraft, a massive corporation. Samuel has embezzled tens of millions of dollars from the company and confides to Winston that not only is he guilty, he’s hidden the cash, and wants Winston’s help to keep it hidden. Nelsestuen adeptly establishes a palpably thick atmosphere of both despair and dread—Winston is crushed under the weight of a lifetime of bad choices. He is also drawn with considerable nuance. Winston’s darkness is artfully depicted by the author; he’s not an unabashed nihilist—he still feels the pangs of guilt and the push of moral rectitude, and the reader cannot help but wonder, at the conclusion of this powerful tale, if he even experiences hope. Nelsestuen has no interest, thankfully, in bandying about any facile answers or neatly contrived denouements. This is a genuinely complex tale, one that confronts, with impressive verisimilitude, the complexity of moral affairs.

A deeply thoughtful drama that never condescends with easy moralizing.