Perilous journey leads to self-discovery

In the autumn of 1963, a man and his son set out from their small town on Minnesota’s Lake Superior shore, heading northwest into the desolate lakes and rivers straddling the Canadian border. Why would they canoe into unfamiliar territory even as winter approaches?

That’s one of the questions in “Wintering” (Knopf, $26.95, 320 pages), Peter Geye’s gripping new novel. But to steal a line from Harry Eide, the father who undertakes this expedition with 18-year-old Gus, it’s just the tip of the iceberg — one that stretches forward to 1996 and back to 1896, in a masterfully crafted collection of stories involving the Eide clan and the fictional town of Gunflint since Gus’ great-grandmother arrived there from Norway.

In a novel that has a lot to say about the relation between history and memory, it’s memory — jumbling time and playing tricks with us — that shapes story. So let’s start with that 1963 adventure, a page-turning cross between Jack London’s naturalism and Jim Harrison’s poetic symbolism. Harry is lighting out from a broken marriage and stunted life with nothing to guide him but a lifetime spent outdoors and a series of maps — laboriously copied into a book from drawings made by the French voyageurs of old during their perilous journeys of discovery.

“Their maps told stories of where they’d been or wanted to go, of who they aspired to be and what they wanted from the world,” Gus later reflects.

Of course those maps are therefore flawed; as he and his father wander further off the grid, Gus wonders why Harry had “relied on them while knowing full well their fallibility.”

But every story trying to map our relation to the world will be incomplete; to nevertheless make voyages into the wilderness of the self offers the prospect of finding more of who one is by daring to first get lost. What Gus will learn during this trip is the courage to fail, losing his former sense of self and being reborn.

“How brave it was for him to try to rediscover something, even if it was only himself, not a continent,” Gus later reflects of his father, shortly after the now-demented Harry has made a repeat trip into winter in 1996, from which he’ll never return.

There’s plenty of philosophy in “Wintering,” but it’s as taut and lean as Geye’s muscular prose, which simultaneously shapes a thrilling and terrifying adventure story, pitting the Eides against darkness itself.

Gus relays his story to Berit Lovig, who’d loved Harry all her adult life, much of it spent waiting for him to emerge from his loveless marriage. Berit gives us an equally tough, frequently melancholic history of the Eides and Gunflint. Her portrait gallery is filled with studies of lonely women, each of them as hard to map as the wintry world through which Harry and Gus make their way.

There’s Gus’ great-grandmother, dead shortly after giving birth to her only child. Gus’ grandmother, who abandons Harry shortly after birth. Gus’ mother, who cuckolds Harry. Berit herself, who loves Harry.

There are many reasons to read this wonderful book — most impressive is how successfully Geye joins the narratives, stitching together two frequently dissociated strands in American literature: its dramas of beset manhood and its domestic chronicles.

“Wintering” vividly imagines an outward bound journey that eventually brings us home to a fuller understanding of ourselves, through a history Gus rightly calls “rich,” “colorful” and “complicated.”