A Family of Heroes: A Review of Eric Larsen's "The End of the 19th Century"

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A Family of Heroes

The End of the 19th Century
A novel by Eric Larsen
The Progressive Press, 2008

Eric Larsen has not written a conventional novel, beginning with a murder, because he’s too much of a scholar to find himself at home in the company of more popular writers. Instead, he has written a family history, beginning with his great grandfather, whom in the book he calls Dr. Reiner. In reality, Dr. Reiner is Peder Laurentius Larsen, the founder of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Laur. Larsen, the name he preferred, was a brilliant classical scholar, born in Kristiansand, Norway, on Aug. 10, 1833. When he entered the University in Christiania, (Oslo), he was a classmate of Henrik Ibsen. There were too many trained pastors in Norway, so Laur. listened to the call to serve the Norwegians who were thinly scattered on farms in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. He single-handedly went out with missionary zeal to begin new Lutheran congregations throughout the region. He swam swollen rivers and got stuck in the bogs and tramped through The Big Woods to answer the call from these isolated Norwegian farmers.

When the Norwegians wanted their own college to train Americans for the ministry, so they wouldn’t be dependent on the German-American institutions, they called on Laur. Larsen to organize their project from top to bottom, and he held the position of the first President of Luther College for forty-one years. In his great-grandson Eric Larsen’s new novel, the author modestly writes that his great grandfather, Dr. Reiner, established an academy in a fictional Archer, Nebraska.

In the story, one of Dr. Reiner’s children, Marie, takes a position as professor of history at the fictional Old College, which is modeled on St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. This character, Marie, is obviously derived from Karen Larsen, author of A History of Norway, (Princeton, 1948) and her warm, sensitive, and inspiring biography of her father entitled Laur. Larsen: Pioneer College President (NAHA, 1936).

Eric Larsen should have pulled out all the stops and written a story about the many Norwegian-American heroes in his family. There were multiple stars in Laur.’s family, with two of his sons becoming classical scholars, one teaching at the University of Chicago and another becoming provost of the University of Illinois after serving as chairman of the Department of English at the University of Iowa. Eric, instead of bragging about his ancestors, chooses to brood like a true Norwegian-American scholar; he earned a BA from Carleton College and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Instead of telling a story on a grand scale, Larsen chooses to write what appears to be a documentary, including lists of names and dates of the members of his fictional Reiner family, omitting their elite status in the world of scholarship and the Lutheran Church.

The reader, at first, sees only the surface, but not the depth of the Reiner family conflicts. The safest way for Eric Larsen to tell the story of his own life is to make it a documentary created by the boy-narrator, Malcolm. For example, Malcolm’s father is horribly conflicted by his distinguished ancestry and by his boring life in a small town. The result is that he drowns his anger in alcohol, and this more than anything affects his only son, who is a victim of the pressure his father feels to follow in the footsteps of his own distinguished father and grandfather. Malcolm, the youngest male in the Reiner family line, has to deal with a history that he sees as disintegrating on the same prairies where his great-grandfather had been a pioneer pastor. Larsen tells his story in part through pictorial diagrams of, for example, Malcolm’s great aunts Marie and Lutie’s house and other important houses and locations. Larsen does not want to sound his own horn about the real Larsens who populated Northfield, but he uses what is in effect a self-effacing and innovative diary form. It is left up to the reader to connect the dots, which should be fun for alumni of Luther and St. Olaf Colleges, and the many other Norwegian-Americans who are interested in their ancestry and survival in America.

It is personal survival that is at stake in this story. If a young boy is the last in a chain of distinguished scholars and ministers, and if his father has crashed because of his family history and religious pressure, how can this young boy find himself? In the novel, he runs like the wind to escape his father’s wrath. He does strange things because his father does strange things, and he knows that because his great aunt Marie is still a staunch, conservative Norwegian scholar, his own survival is going to be conflicted because of his unorthodox behaviors.

The form of Larsen’s latest book is innovative, and it appears to be a series of unconnected scenes and memories. But if you remember the tremendous social pressure that this young narrator is living under, you will appreciate his various humiliations, at Emerson School, for example, as he watches his world collapse. Finally, his town disappears from the map, a disappearance that can be understood as a symbolic disappearance caused by the idealistic narrator’s repression of his own family history.

Eric Larsen is, also, the author of the prize-winning, must-read novel An American Memory (Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, 1988), a dramatic companion novel about the troubles of the Reiner family. His second novel, I Am Zoe Handke, is based on the girlhood and Carleton College experiences of his spouse, Anne. His third major work is a scholarly analysis of the sorry state of college education today entitled: A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.

You can order The End of The 19th Century at Amazon.com or at your local bookstore.

­-Kenneth Nels Hokeness


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