FICTION: Reeling from a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's, a writer and former ski jumper strives to dissect his family mythology.
"The Ski Jumpers" by Peter Geye; University of Minnesota Press (408 pages, $25.95)
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"The Ski Jumpers" is Minnesota novelist Peter Geye's novel about a novelist writing a novel. That might sound meta, but it works.
After receiving a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's, English professor Jon Bargaard has good reason to stop working on the book he's trying to write. If ever there was a good excuse for writer's block, this is it. He's also having trouble resolving family issues; his transcendent memories of childhood ski jumping are only notes in a drawer; and what's more, he doesn't want to hurt anyone, particularly his wife, with what he dredges up from his past.
But then the disease is diagnosed; and — like a ski jumper blending takeoff with stall to reach a perfect telemark landing — Jon must merge his past with his present to ready himself for an uncertain future.
"If you were lucky," Jon explains in one of many lyrical descriptions of ski jumping, "the second act of flight was exultant. It was easiness, even as you accelerated, shredding the atmosphere and racing back to consciousness and the Earth. It was your reward. Then your wings unfolded slowly, and slowly you breathed again."
The story begins with Jon and his wife, Ingrid, coming to terms with Jon's diagnosis. She is devoted and kind and will care for him until the end. He feels horrible about what she'll have to endure. As they drive north to visit their daughter as well as a childhood friend, Jon contemplates the messy as well as the beautiful parts of his life growing up in north Minneapolis.
A bit slow to take off, the story really gets going once Geye's narrative rhythm is established. At that point, he jumps back and forth in time seamlessly. From present to past to way past to present, important reveals are artfully dropped. The back story begins with Jon's father as a young man winning a ski jump competition in Chicago and absconding to Minneapolis with a gangster's No. 1 showgirl and ends with Jon's father's funeral.
In between, we learn things — the showgirl leaves him; Jon's father marries her sister; Jon and his brother Anton grow up ski jumping at Theodore Wirth Park and do well at national competitions (where, oddly, there are no female competitors). Tragic things happen. Teenage Jon must care for 10-year-old Anton. There are secrets, misunderstandings. Resentment grows. The brothers, once inseparable, become estranged. But all comes to a sweet resolution the night of their father's funeral when the brothers go for a 3 a.m. ski in Theodore Wirth Park.
If Geye is Minnesota's Thoreau, then his Pond is a frozen lake. He writes so fetchingly of Minnesota in the wintertime that the state's tourism department should distribute his books. But where his previous novels are set Up North, here it's Minneapolis, and when Jon and Anton "clipped those bindings and started poling across the Broadway interstate bridge" I recalled sweet nights long ago tobogganing at Theodore Wirth with my family.
"From the top of the jump one could see the downtown Minneapolis skyline lit up," Jon recalls. "Even on that snowy night, it presided over the horizon, a strobing and distant shine filtered by the snow."
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Christine Brunkhorst is a Minneapolis-based writer and reviewer.
