Shelter by Sarah Stonich (2011. Borealis Books. ISBN 978-0-87351-775-1)
A fine novelist can make a fine nonfiction storyteller. That’s the thing one learns if one has read and appreciated Minnesota native Sarah Stonich’s works of literary fiction (These Granite Islands and The Ice Chorus) as well as her most recent book, Shelter.
Categorized by the publisher as a memoir, the flow of Stonich’s latest is more akin to spending time with a close friend, male or female, and talking about the general nature and nuances of modern existence rather than a strictly linear story of one girl’s northeastern Minnesota roots and her unexpected diaspora upon relocating to the Twin Cities.
Ostensibly the tale of a single mom (who just happens to write for a living) searching for a place “up north” where she can build a rustic cabin to share with her growing son, Shelter is, over its slim 208 pages, so much more. Internet dating. Conservation versus preservation. Minneapolitans versus locals. Mining history. Logging history. Family legends. Family secrets. Ethnicity and roots. These themes are all touched upon as Ms. Stonich chronicles her search to find sanctuary in the piney forest her ancestors once inhabited.
Throughout the book’s serious passages of love and loss and divorce and anguish, Stonich maintains a clever and bawdy sense of humor, as the following passages depict:
If isolation fosters extremism, northern Minnesota is a potential incubator for nutcases on either end. A fanatic, as my father defined one, is anybody with his head so far up his own ass he can’t smell anyone else’s…On the road north, you’re welcomed to the region by an array of signs planted next to Highway 53 near Cotton, where for decades the landowner has been posting hand-painted billboards that change as his beefs do. Sometimes the signs are illustrated with primitive drawings, as if painted by a sort of Curmudgeon Moses. At the height of the anti-French sentiment that swept Real America a number of years ago, curmudgeon painted the UN flag urinated on by a poodle…(H)is compound is surrounded by ten-foot fencing that warns “No Trespassing, Injury very Likely”, which should dissuade most anyone from approaching his bunker, or his spaceship in progress, or whatever he does behind the scary fence.
Or this gem from her first Internet dating experience after her divorce:
Bachelor Number One was handsome and interesting., definitely showing promise right up until the bill came. We both had the same meal…and we each had a beer. When it was time to split the tab, he tallied the price difference of my bottled beer to his draft beer, making my share 79 cents more. I paid the extra and then covered for his miserly 10 percent tip. Date over.
My only disappointment in reading Shelter was the ending. I would have preferred that the story end with the scene depicting Ms. Stonich’s father unable to cry at the funeral of a friend until…I won’t give it away here. But that scene, to me, should have been the tale’s final act, or, as they say in Ely, “the end of the road”. To me, the concluding paragraphs that follow the funeral scene exude artifice in an otherwise very sincere, funny, and compelling work.
4 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
