The End of the 19th Century

Larsen stretches conventional fiction's reach with this story of a character whose childhood and coming-of-age consist of his gradual internalizing of history-as he puts it, his coming to understand "the mysteries of space and time." At first, he sees only glimpses of life-through the briefly-opened "windows" of eyesight in early childhood. Later on, everything begins serving as windows into the past-objects, locations, landscapes, the town he's born in, the people in it-even his aging great-aunts Marie and Lutie, whose origins are back in the 19th century. Through small things like a visit from his great-aunts one afternoon in 1944 (when he's four years old), a blimp cruising overhead in 1946, goldfish hovering beneath the surface of a pond, the sound of a train whistle in the night, Malcolm Reiner comes to understand that things can be related "horizontally," then also "vertically"-relationships that, when combined with the element of time itself, reveal history-that is, as life, followed by the absence of life-to be a web of such intricate complexity that it can't ever be understood. And yet Reiner dedicates his life to exactly this "study of the mysteries of space and time." In his "studies" he finds a sweep of time includes the history of West Tree, Minnesota; of the "Epoch of Walking"; and of his own "years of perfect seeing," the period when, living on a farm outside West Tree, he's able, with a poetic vividness rare in fiction, to sense and see what America once was.