A detailed, wide-lens historical novel of Finnish Americans then and now.
Munger (Boomtown, 2016, etc.) concludes his Finnish American trilogy with a novel that hops between a modern assassination plot and an early-20th-century immigration experience.
Anders Alhömaki grows up planning to inherit his stepfather’s farm in Finland’s Kainuu region. After a failed relationship with a Kale woman, however, Anders leaves his homeland behind and finds work in Norway’s copper mines. Here he gains a reputation as a boxer, though one whose head is already across the sea: “Aren’t you the one who’s always dreaming of America?” His travels eventually bring him to the mines of Michigan and Minnesota, where many Finns have settled, looking for a better life. Anders is given the opportunity to be his own man—and perhaps to find love in the roiling, immigrant-filled Upper Midwest. Anders’ story is offset by another occurring in 2017. Dr. Janine Tanninen, the daughter of an African-American father and a Finnish American mother from Anders’ Upper Midwest milieu, has married a Finnish man and moved to Finland to assist the resettlement of Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, a disgruntled man plots the assassination of Assistant Director of Immigration for Refugees and Migration Tarja Saariaho. Saariaho, he believes, in her role of resettling Muslim immigrants in Finland, is working to erase the country’s Christian identity. “And now I hear she’s considering a run for fucking president!” he fumes. “That woman has as much right to lead Finland as a drunk sleeping in...downtown Stockholm has to be crowned king of Sweden!” With the roles reversed—Finland an importer rather than an exporter of those looking for a better life—the story of the Alhömakis comes to a startling conclusion. Munger’s prose capably summons the stark landscapes of the novel, which embody both melancholy and understated beauty: “Across the bleak land, a lantern twinkled in a window. He moved quickly; the rhythm of skiing as innate as walking to a young boy of the north.” It’s a sprawling novel, as one would expect from the third volume in a multigenerational immigrant saga, but Munger demonstrates an impressive amount of control as he toggles between the historical (sections 1 and 3) and the contemporary (sections 2 and 4). There is quite a bit of coincidence at work, but perhaps that is par for this genre, which usually seeks to reveal continuities between people and across time. The Anders sections, in particular, manage to evoke the deliberative naturalism of Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, and Munger effectively maintains this strategy even into the sections set in 2017. His attempts to grapple with current immigration issues, including Syrian refugees in Europe and the election of Donald Trump, make for a complex yet appropriate end to a series that is essentially a long meditation on leaving home and building another life somewhere else. Fans of thoughtful, probing historical fiction should enjoy this final volume, which stands well enough on its own.
A detailed, wide-lens historical novel of Finnish Americans then and now.Pub Date: June 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73244-340-2
Page Count: 363
Publisher: Cloquet River Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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