The Expeditions [Paperback]

Karl Iagnemma (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2009

From Karl Iagnemma, recipient of the Paris Review Plimpton Prize, comes this fierce and gorgeous novel, the story of an estranged father and son’s unlikely wanderings through the Upper Peninsula of nineteenth-century Michigan.

The year is 1844. Sixteen-year-old runaway Elisha Stone has turned up in Detroit, a hardscrabble frontier town on the edge of the civilized world. Lighting out on a surveying expedition for the vast unknown wilderness of the northern peninsula, Elisha pens a heartfelt letter to his mother in Newell, Massachusetts. But it is Elisha’s estranged father, the Reverend William Edward Stone, who opens the envelope. Grief-stricken by the recent death of his wife—a death Elisha could not have known about—Reverend Stone is jolted into action. He must find his son. What follows is a powerful narrative about the complex love between fathers and sons and an evocative portrait of an era of faith, wonder, and violence. A first novel of uncommon wisdom, The Expeditions is the confirmation of an extraordinary talent.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

a haunting coming-of-age tale set in an emerging nation groping for identity,the first novel from MIT research scientist Iagnemma follows his story collection, On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction. Working his way across the country at 16 in 1844, Elisha Stone dreams of becoming a naturalist after running away from his aging Massachusetts minister father and ailing mother three years earlier. He signs on as an assistant to survey expedition leader Silas Brush, but the guide, a ne'er-do-well named Ignace Morel, disappears as the party is set to depart for the unexplored northern Michigan peninsula. Ignace's wife, a beautiful half Chippewa woman named Susette, takes over as guide at a time when woman guides were unheard of. Back in Massachusetts, the Reverend Stone, who is slipping unknowingly into opium addiction, receives a dramatic letter Elisha has sent to his mother, who has died. Impulsively, the guileless minister sets out to find Elisha, ostensibly to tell him of his mother's death, but also to reconcile with his son. The plot is marvelously structured, and the secondaries (including humbug Jonah Crawley and his teenage clairvoyant fiancée, Adele Grainger) add real color. Beautifully written and outstandingly researched, Iagnemma's first novel is a keeper. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

Iagnemma, a research scientist whose short stories have reflected on the adventurous, even romantic, nature of scientific work, explores these themes at greater length in the tale of Elisha Stone, a sixteen-year-old runaway and amateur naturalist who, in 1844, wins a place on an expedition to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The party’s leader, a wealthy surveyor, is interested only in locating deposits of iron ore ("Fortunes are built from gold. But nations are built from iron"). He finds an antagonist in an idealistic professor desperate to discover artifacts to prove his theory of the single origin of all races. They are trailed by Elisha’s father, a flawed minister, on the point of succumbing to a "wet and thready" consumptive cough, who is determined to tell him of his mother’s death. Iagnemma evokes time and place with illuminating detail, but the intellectual insight of his earlier work is absent. Elisha is more paragon than person, and the thrill of discovery seems curiously unfelt.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback; Reprint edition (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385335962
• ISBN-13: 978-0385335966
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,039,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Illuminating and Moving Historical Novel, February 10, 2008

By 

C. Walsh (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Expeditions (Hardcover)

On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction is, for my money, the best American short story collection debut of the 21st century--funny and weighty, as cutting edge as the latest development in engineering and as old as brokenheartedness. The Expeditions is a different animal altogether--but it is equally impressive. The novel has its funny moments--the Rev. Stone notes that he doesn't want to stay in a certain inn because it strikes him as too "characterful"; Suzette the steely halfbreed abuse victim dreams of a place where she hears "the land is free and the soil is good, and there is fishing and hunting and the winters are not so cold"--yes, that promised land, Milwaukee. But this novel is most impressive for the way that, in telling the story of two men--the widower, opium-addicted, preacher father; and his wayward, would-be naturalist son Elisha--Iagnemma manages to illuminate such a broad and overlooked swath of American history and geography. We learn in vivid and convincing detail about the 1840's, and about that tier of land from the northern Appalachian trail to the Great Lakes, so familiar to migrant New Englanders in search of better farmland and better lives, or simply escape from the strictures of family and community. We learn along the way about religion from the old-line Congregationalism of New Hampshire to the Millerites who believed the world would end, like, tomorrow; also of the challenge religion faced in the dawning of the age of Darwin, when the great mysteries of Creation faced the peril of being explained naturally. The Expeditions also introduces us to the Chippewa, to Americans high and low, racist and not, hucksterish and gullible, and to the everyday challenges everyone faced in the days when the country and the industrial revolution were both in their infancy. And we learn about all these things without even realizing it, for the story of father and son separating and then reuniting is a familiar one, but no less enthralling for that. This is a moving and illuminating novel written with gravity and grace--a truly substantial book. I highly recommend it.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An early bid for the Best of 2008, January 15, 2008

By 

Steven B. Almond (Somerville, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Expeditions (Hardcover)

I read "The Expeditions" straight through and found it as enthralling as Iagnemma's excellent story collection. The sentences are pitch perfect, lovely astonishing, and the portrait of America and its religious, atavistic impulses make this an important (and enthralling) national saga. Buy it. You won't regret it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Woe and wonder in the wilderness, February 6, 2008

By 

Bruce Machart - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Expeditions (Hardcover)

I finished this novel last weekend on a long, turbulent flight home from New England, and while I might have been easily pulled from the fictive dream of a lesser novel by the shuddering plane and the peripheral flashing of wing lights and the pervasive, sour smell of bad, coach-fare food warmed in plastic--instead, thankfully, I was trekking through the upper peninsula of Michigan, bearing witness to the quiet, naturalistic transformation of Elisha Stone, to the aching urgency of his consumptive father's pursuit. This is a novel that fulfills the promise of Iagnemma's wonderful collection of stories, _On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction_, one that finds its protagonist on the frontier of his own maturity. A bildungsroman with a convincing, and nearly flawlessly researched, eye for the nuances of setting and history, _The Expeditions_ marks the development of a major talent. And, with all due respect to a previous reviewer, the assertion that a novel is seriously flawed because it makes repeated use of a certain punctuation mark is the sophomoric critical equivalent of defaming a concerto because of a preponderance of sixteenth-notes. This is a novel that pays dividends, one that obviously cost the writer more than the time spent writing it. Here is a work as engaging and emotionally rewarding as the lives it dreams into existence.