Book Review 2016-007
The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye
2013 by Unbridled Books, 304 pages
(I purchased a copy of the kindle version of this and then found the hardcover that Unbridled had sent me some 3 years ago)
Peter Geye has not suffered a sophomore slump with The Lighthouse Road. If anything, he took the many highlights from his debut, Safe From the Sea, and improved upon them. There’s the same great usage of place, strong enough that the Northern Minnesota Lake Superior shore is as important as any other character in the work. Geye has also taken on a more difficult structure this time and given his readers two very well-developed female characters.
The Lighthouse Road continues to mine the lives of those living near Lake Superior on the north shores of Minnesota—this time in Gunflint, just on the other side of Safe From the Shore’s Misquat from the big city of Duluth. However, Geye takes us deeper into that region’s history taking the novel mainly between the late 1890’s and the early 1920’s.
The novel’s structure isn’t straightforward. Instead, it’s told from multiple points of view, as well as bouncing from the 1890’s to the 1920’s and back. Geye does this seamlessly though and frequently a bit of information or development from the end of a section will be important early on in the section that follows. The sections from specific points of view are not always in chronological order either and Geye uses this wonderfully in how he leaves out, or sneaks in, information that eventually gives the reader numerous fully formed characters.
The Lighthouse Road takes a look at immigration, and the American Dream. It begins with Thea Eide, a lovely Norwegian teenager, leaving her parents and their small farm and heading to Gunflint, MN to work on her Uncle and Aunt’s farm. Approaching Gunflint, Thea notices that aside from the trees it looks a lot like the Norway she left behind. That the skiffs coming from the shore to the larger boat to pick her up remind her greatly of her father’s fishing boat. That the dark Superior looks just like the North Sea. She also quickly finds out upon getting to dry land that her Uncle has gone mad and her Aunt hung herself a couple of weeks prior to Thea’s arrival. This leads to her finding work as a cook in a nearby logging camp. The other main characters Geye has given us are Odd Eide, Thea’s son, Hosea Grimm, Gunflint’s jack of all trades, and his “daughter,” Rebekah. There are many other characters within the novel but these four provide the bulk of the story.
Hosea is simply a fascinating character as at times he’s both the good guy AND the bad guy. In fact, he’s probably the second worst person in The Lighthouse Road but the reader will find it very hard not to root for him much of the time. He’s Gunflint’s apothecarist, the town doctor, his nose is in the business of most—he’s the one that first spoke to Thea and helped find her the job at the logging camp—but he also owns a nearby brothel in the woods and is involved in what would be 1890’s pornography. He saved Rebekah from a life of eventual prostitution from a big-city brothel and raised her as his daughter. While their relationship never crosses all of the lines, he uses her in ways considered despicable. Odd also ends up being raised mainly by Hosea as Thea dies early on after Odd’s birth, but can also be considered the orphan of Gunflint as the entire town watches over him.
Between these four individuals, Geye has created at least a dozen great storylines that interact with each other strongly. Among them he hits on every possible emotion, many types of relationships, faith, religion, courage, and more. Topics run from domestic to adventurous to the environment. While it’s obvious that Geye knows all about what Minnesota was like back in those days, the information comes through in his story, not in a litany of specifics that feel researched. Much like Safe From the Sea not being able to be pigeonholed as a father-son story, The Lighthouse Road cannot simply be described—it’s a mother-son story, a displacement story, a love story, and an adventure story, to name but a few. Not even close to a sophomore slump, Geye has actually pushed his work beyond that I though were the very high standards of his debut.
5 stars.
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