First published 1999
The narrator returns to his childhood home in North Dakota, where familiar rooms and objects trigger cascades of memory. He sifts through conversations with his father, moments of understanding and miscommunication that shaped their relationship. The weight of family history presses against him as he examines what his father said and meant, what was spoken and what remained silent. Small gestures carry enormous significance. A glance across the kitchen table. Words offered as comfort that landed as judgment. The narrator struggles to separate his own voice from the voices that formed him. He discovers that understanding the past requires accepting its contradictions. Love and disappointment intertwine in ways that resist simple explanation. The search for truth about his father becomes a reckoning with his own identity as son and storyteller.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: North Dakota
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
Hardcover · Viking Penguin Inc