POWER & LIGHT

In Weaver’s historical novel, a Norwegian farm girl in North Dakota is assaulted by a prominent man, placing the family in a grimly precarious position.

In 1906, Karl Haugen, a low-ranking farmhand working for a despotic family in Norway, flees in the dead of night with his family to America. They settle in Skye, North Dakota, but Karl dies in 1925, and his wife, Petra, follows him to the grave shortly thereafter, leaving their four children—Emil, Dagmar, Sally, and Jenny—to fend for themselves on the family farm. In 1933, when Sally is only 17 years old, she is raped by the town doctor, Robert McConnell, while sedated during a medical procedure. She’s slow to tell anyone, especially Emil, now the head of the family and prone to mercurial violence, since she believes no one will take her word over the doctor’s. However, she becomes pregnant from the assault, making the secret impossible to keep. Emil leaves the baby girl that results with an unsuspecting family on a train and begins to plot a ghastly revenge upon McConnell, one as inventive as it is macabre, mesmerizingly depicted by the author (“The slimmest of trimming would make the boot rub slightly. Rub slowly. Over time”). The stoic Haugens are an unforgettable family; it seems impossible they could blend in well anywhere in the world. The author paints a bracingly unsentimental view of their toughness—Jenny draws this astonishing conclusion after the family weathers some terrible losses: “You’re never going to go soft on the world.” Weaver’s prose is beguiling, achieving a mercilessly spare poetry (“Ahead, a field mouse hung on a barb. A gray, masked bird sat nearby, a shrike, a bird who killed its own kind”) that perfectly matches the only kind of love of which the Haugens are capable: quietly inexpressive but also inexhaustible. This is an impressive literary achievement, a genuinely moving novel without a single line of treacly kitsch.

A consuming work of profound poetical depth and moral power.