An American Memory [Hardcover]

Eric Larsen (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This first novel about three generations of a Midwestern family is a powerful and quietly moving narrative revealed in exquisitely rendered fragments. Young Malcolm's childhood takes place on the Reiner family farm in Minnesota where his grandparents, descended from Norwegian pioneer stock, settled, and, like dust, are still settling as Malcolm sifts the evidence of his family's past. Central to this sensitive narrator's search is his father's implicit disapproval; Malcolm is awed by this restless and silently angry man who dominates a room even when asleep. Malcolm must find connections with his family by rummaging through a trunk of relics in the attic, and he comes to know its various members' life stories by observation and deduction, as one might study an overgrown landscape for clues of hidden rocks formations. The Reiner heritage is one of death, isolation, crippling loss. Old photographs that disclose hidden details and explain circumstances while raising new and unanswerable questions are layered with memories of shocking events snapshot-like in their clarity and vivid depiction of one moment frozen in time. Malcolm's sense of loss and separation is ultimately overwhelming, and his search for identity takes him into an emotional abyss from which he emerges whole, though fragile. Writing with a delicate grace and rhythm that invite comparison to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Larsen's debut reveals a rare and poetic gift.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 227 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; 1st edition (April 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0912697687
• ISBN-13: 978-0912697680
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,502,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Eric Larsen was born in Northfield, Minnesota, where, after attending the public schools, he graduated from Carleton College in 1963. He took an M.A. in English from the University of Iowa and in 1971 completed his Ph.D. there, with Robert Scholes as one of his faculty advisors. For his dissertation, under the direction of William Cotter Murray, he wrote a volume of original stories accompanied by his own critical commentaries.

In 1971, after living abroad for two years, Larsen joined the English Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and remained there until his retirement in early 2006. He is married to the editor Anne Larsen. The couple have two grown daughters.

Larsen published stories and essays in quarterlies and magazines throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1988 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill brought out his novel 'An American Memory,' which became the winner of the Chicago Tribune's inaugural Heartland Prize for the year's best novel of or about the middle west.

In 1992, Algonquin published 'I Am Zo' Handke,' a novel complementing and advancing several of the elements and themes of 'An American Memory.' Changes in the national mood, in reading habits, in academics, and in popular taste from the early 1990s on brought about a situation whereby Larsen's third and fourth novels ('The End of the 19th Century' and 'The Decline and Fall of the American Nation'), making up a tetralogy, remain unpublished. In spring 2006, Shoemaker & Hoard published his book of political and cultural criticism, 'A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.'

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a stunning debut from an under-read artist, June 25, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: An American Memory (Hardcover)

Chilling in its detail, powerful in its emotional resonance, and unconventional in its narrative, An American Memory may be one of the strongest debuts by an American writer in the last twenty years. Mr. Larsen describes the subtle dysfunction and destruction of a Midwestern family through three generations and in the process forces the reader to examine his own demons. Bouncing from time period to time period and from POV to POV, the novel weaves years of seemingly innocent acts into a quilt of despair and then, ultimate salvation. The terror of memory and the inablility to understand time's progress combine to provide for the protagonists, and the reader, a lonely journey. Larsen has the uncanny ability to underplay a scene so well that not until pages later does one find oneself overwhelmed by its implications. Like the experience of standing on a prarie with the wind blowing around you and not another person in sight, this novel will resonate for many many years in my soul