Deep Freeze

It gets cold in Trippton.  Set in Minnesota, the small town has icy weather in the way Minnesota is known for during the winter months.

II.

Among those living with the seasonal cold and snow in John Sandford's Deep Freeze, there is David Birkmann.  His school days in Trippton were a time in which he collected a series of nicknames.  None of these unofficial names were of Dave's own choosing, and all of them were intended to poke fun at him.  "Big Dave", because David was considered fat.  "Bug Boy", because Dave's father owned an insect exterminator business.  As for "Chips", it recalled the incident when Dave had tried to shake a bag of chips loose from a high school vending machine, only to have the machine tip and fall on him.  For this episode, and the perceived comedy of his general social ineptitude, Dave had been selected Class of '92 Funniest Boy.

In the years after high school, David goes on to become the fortysomething owner of the pest exterminator business that he inherited when his father passed away.  He is newly-divorced, just as someone he went to school with, Gina Hemming, has recently filed for divorce.  Dave's attraction to Gina is long-running and unrequited, but with their marriages playing out as they have, he dares to be hopeful.  "There she was, David's first and truest love. Available." <1> 

III.

Virgil Flowers is on a week's vacation from his work with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, when he is called in by the BCA.  The dead and frozen body of a woman has been found in a river near Trippton, and Flowers is needed on the case.  Virgil's boss, Jon Duncan, is well-aware that he is cutting Flowers's vacation short.  " 'Virgil, I owe you.' 'You keep saying that, but you never pay off.' "  With a reference to the Shakespeare he, Jon, had brought up earlier in their conversation, Duncan replies:  " 'That's one of your fardels' ".  Virgil breaks the news to his girlfriend and makes his way to Trippton - to investigate the murder of Gina Hemming.

Flowers hasn't been in town long before he finds himself assisting a private detective, Margaret Griffin, on a case of her own.  A production of altered Barbie and Ken dolls has been traced to Trippton.  The alteration to the dolls is of an obscene nature, and Griffin has come all the way from Los Angeles " '[t]rying to serve a federal cease-and-desist order' ".  Jon Duncan has officially attached Virgil to Griffin's investigation, and along with leading the Gina Hemming homicide inquiry, it looks like Virgil Flowers could be in for an extended stay in Trippton.

IV.  

There is plenty of humour in Deep Freeze, but the narrative can get just as serious as it needs to be for a crime novel.  The identity of the killer is revealed early to the reader.  To learn what we already know, Virgil Flowers has to piece it together from the evidence he finds amid the idiosyncrasies of small-town conversation, gossip and behaviour.  John Sandford is a marvelous storyteller, whether he is relating the town of Trippton as a seemingly harmless place, and, when it is not.

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<1>Sandford, John. Deep Freeze (2017). G.P. Putnam's Sons.

The Charming, and the Charmed

A brutal truth was kept from Billy Lynch.  Family and friends had decided that Billy's best interests were served in this way.  Were they also patronizing, or infantilizing a grown man?  Such a consideration would be an aside to them, as theirs were actions arising from a larger concern for Billy, after all.

II.

In Alice McDermott's Charming Billy, a group of mourners have gathered at the funeral of Billy Lynch.  They are from the working-class New York community of Irish-Americans to which Billy belonged.  Saddened as they are, none among them are particularly surprised that Billy's alcoholism had finally killed him.  A gregarious, Yeats-quoting dreamer, Billy had had a long history of alcohol abuse in trying to deal with his troubles.  At the end of this first chapter in the novel, McDermott then reveals that certain truth which had been kept from Billy for some time. 

As a young man finding his way after the Second World War, Billy had fallen in love with Eva, an Irish visitor to New York.  When she returns to Ireland, Billy works to send Eva the money to return to America so that they might continue their romance, and marry.  Eva has other plans about her marriage.  She weds a local man in Ireland, and invests Billy's money in a business with her new husband.  It comes to Billy's cousin, Dennis, to inform Billy of Eva's actions.  But since he cannot bear to tell Billy the truth, Dennis alters it.  "Better he be brokenhearted then trailed all the rest of his life by a sense of his own foolishness." <1>  Dennis lies to Billy, telling him that Eva had died, having succumbed to pneumonia.

 

Despite his misgivings, Dennis's lie endures.  By the time Billy learns the truth on a trip to Ireland, thirty years have passed.  Over those years, Billy's drinking turns into alcoholism.  To what extent did the lie about Eva's death contribute to Billy's drinking problem?  Should a person as Billy, prone to strong emotions, including - or especially - the romantic, been lied to in such a way?

There are many fine, suggestive passages as we move back and forth in time with the story.  In a scene that has Billy and Eva newly together in New York, McDermott tells us of a "vast darkness beyond them and the indifferent pounding of the sea ... a sickening sense of false hope and false promise that required all of God's grace to keep at bay."  A world war has caused devastating losses and deep trauma.  This has led some to turn to their faith.  "[A] new sense that only the daily, formal petition for mercy would get them through the rest of their lives." 

Lives, and then, a mortal end.  The focus on the causes and circumstances of Billy's death changes as the novel moves toward its conclusion.  McDermott speaks of the passing that is coming for us all.  "[T]he void that met a used-up body, a spent mind ... the abyss toward which you stumbled inevitably, part of the crowd ... eventually, one after the other, every one of you will fall."

III.

A sense of consolation builds throughout Alice McDermott's Charming Billy.  It is a book grave, but also, radiant.

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<1>McDermott, Alice. Charming Billy (1998). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.