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Shelter Half

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Carol Bly, "Shelter Half." Duluth, MN: Holy Cow! Press, 2008. 248 pages. $15.95. ISBN 978-0-9779458-6-3

Carol Bly's posthumously published and only novel is a remarkable achievement by any standard--plot, characterization, theme, intelligence, perception.
It esembles earlier Bly essays and stories, but extends and deepens her range as a fiction writer. Although, or perhaps because, she takes risks, they are all to good and relevant purpose. One senses Bly's beloved Tolstoy in the background, whispering, "go deeper," and she does, as the novel resonates with the history of the last half-century.
The narrative unfolds in a series of scenes following the discovery of a young woman's body on the outskirts of a small town in northern Minnesota. Each chapter almost a story in itself. Events and characters that may appear tangential to the main narrative, however, are eventually woven into its complex tapestry of related and integrated portraits and experiences.
Shelter Half's assemblage of characters and personalities may remind the reader of Chekhov, with various members of the community playing significant roles. They include a no-good, lying Brad Stropp and his abused wife, Arlene; Pearl, bartender, church organist, and a no-nonsense judge of character; Eliza MacInnes, a 23 year-old Episcopal rector; Vern Denham, a handsome young whistle-blower, and John Rubrick, a smooth executive whose Institute for Humane Research "tortured rabbits as part of product development." Each of the characters remain consistently and imminently believable, in their instincts and flaws, their failure and hard-won victories.
Flashes of wit inform the narrative, as in this comment by local social worker about Californians. "There was no more futile exercise than agreeing to do psychological work with clients in California; they came to their first sessions full of cheer like expectant shoppers for in-season organic fruit."
Thirty-year old Imogen Tenebray, is a kind of central consciousness, whose choices and decisions impinge on other characters. She is a memorable woman thinking her way through her life and making choices that distance her from her family and neighbors, even those sympathetic to her values. Her thoughts, as she is about to talk with her therapist "about something very, very bad, are representative: "For a murderous species. we are certainly courteous,"
Following a personal tragedy earlier, Imogene has immersed herself in the moral and political concerns of the wider community, as a counselor and director of a peace center in Duluth. Once admired as a community organizer, she is eventually forsaken by her contemporaries for tolerating homeless people sleeping on the stairway to the peace center.
Imogene's parents, Peter and Natalie Tenebray, are local sophisticates who "didn't share their private lives with folks having coffee at the bakery or even after church. They were said to give bash-up dinner parties on the weekend, where other Episcopalians who were college graduate types went--but news never sifted from those parties out to...the Friday night philosophers at the VFW." Peter, a Harvard alumus, supplements his inherited income writing articles that present corporation's interests "in the light of that company's good intentions and potential good behavior." He is a "whitener," in other words, whose moral behavior is shaky, but not completely hopeless.
Shelter Half concludes with a meeting of a German and an American veteran of World War Two, conquered and conqueror, in a reconciliation at once mysterious, complicated, and convincing. Bridging a gap that we sometimes feel toward events of the past half century, it offers valuable insights into the moral, cultural, and aesthetic implications of the present.
Not surprisingly, the novel responds to demands Bly made of American writers, in her memorable pamphlet, Bad Government and Silly Literature, 1986. "Most of the characters in American fiction are fools," she wrote at that time, "who have no political or ethical feelings, seldom betraying any feelings of shame for our nation and fear for the planet itself." Although they "are not meant to be fools, the characters "conduct their joys and frets during unjust wars and terrible domestic poverty and never notice.
Ducking that condition, if we like," Bly continued "our literature will remain what it largely is now--rather too self-centered and capricious, with its plots full of private love life and financial considerations". Needless to say, Shelter Half ventures far beyond the narrow fictional landscape that she criticized.
In a body of work that includes essays, stories, commentaries on writing, ethics, and community, and finally this novel, Bly claims a special place among American writers. She is populist and sophisticated, with a moral vision and wit reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis and J. F. Powers. Although her gentle satire differs from theirs, it reflects a similarly penetrating eye for detail, as she plummets the depths of that Upper Midwestern and American culture.
Having known Bly's work, since we first became friends three decades before her death, I have long admired her intelligence and daring as an artist. But I must admit to being even further impressed by this novel. It took my breath away. The prefatory note on the title, Shelter Half--that is, the half a pup tent issued to American infantrymen--is alone worth the price of the book.
--Michael True

Why do some people put their necks out for others? Why is the call for honor and justice answered even when there is so much to be lost? "Shelter Half" is the first and sadly only novel by author Carol Bly, who unfortunately passed away last year. Her tale lives on as an examination of honor among human beings, as a murder occurs in a small Minnesotan town. A finely written mystery from a new perspective, "Shelter Half" is highly recommended for community library fiction collections.

For many years American infantrymen were issued a "shelter half," which was half of a pup tent. At the end of a day, each soldier had to join up with a buddy so that the two of them could attach their shelter halves and thereby share a single tent. This image sets the theme of cooperation and caring that runs through Carol Bly's only novel, Shelter Half, finished just before her death from cancer in December of 2007. Bly is well-known in Minnesota as a short story writer, essayist, teacher and social worker, and to her followers it is no surprise that her novel is a good one.

Shelter Half is a portrait of life in a small town in Northern Minnesota. It is incidentally the story of a murder discovered on its opening page, but it is primarily about people failing or succeeding to live decently with one another. We see the life of the town through the eyes of a number of representative characters, the cop and the rector, the town bully and the town doctor, and a marvelously realized do-gooder who only in the end realizes that he has not done good at all. Bly imagines her world not just once, but as it exists in the minds of each of these characters. The different points of view are held together by the question of the murder, and by other recurring events and projects within the town. This is a novel of great craft and great moral imagination.

Despite the seriousness of Bly's intentions, she is no stranger to wit and humor, as when she describes the woman whose "motionless eyes were like the gun and cannon muzzles of a tank still pointed at you well after its captain or crew had died inside." Or when she says of a certain lying low-life that "his brain-dead waste ran out of his mouth like bad water from a culvert." And many of her chapters are nearly small stories in themselves, with ironic reversals culminating in a rearrangement of a character's attitudes or knowledge.

The novel's most powerful message is that we must recognize evil and act against it if we are to care for one another. Tremendous empathy and moral purpose, not to mention craft and wit, went into this book, and one can only regret that Bly did not turn to novel writing sooner in her life. It is no surprise to her fans that her novel is good, but just how good could not have been anticipated. At a recent memorial event, someone who knew her said that she respected the novel form so much that she hesitated to give it a try. Her hesitation is a loss, but this one, final achievement of her life is a great gift. Shelter Half is published in Duluth, MN by Holy Cow! Press.

As a Minnesotan I thought this captured some of our cultural values and found the interpersonal, small town relationships to be an interesting forum for good and evil to interact. About half way through I got the feeling that I should have started reading the last chapter first; unfortunately the author was not finished with the book and it needed a bit more editing to "flow".

I'm sure someone else would enjoy this book more than I did. It was a struggle for me to get through this one. I had difficulty keeping the characters straight. It seemed like the characters would get dropped from the story and then several chapters later there they were again.

Not the greatest book for me!