Review: Down from Basswood by Lynn Maria Laitala

I read and write for a living, which is probably why I don't take on as much fiction as I would like these days. A few years ago, during the lengthy layoff which gave me time to write Eating Crow, I read constantly--I remember ingesting ten of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels in a two-month period. What precious time I now have to dedicate to the printed page tends to go to journalism, in that furious scramble to always stay on top of events; to remain politically fluent and relevant. But once in a while an intriguing volume lands in my lap and I have to give it a look.

One recent example was Mark Munger's Suomalaiset, People of the Marsh, which chronicles the Finnish-American experience in northeastern Minnesota in the early 20th century. Judge Munger is obviously a capable researcher, but in attempting a historical novel, it's almost as if he forgot to remove the footnotes and cross references. Suomalaiset is often smothered in verisimilitude--brands of beer, descriptions of settings, name-dropping--and this fetish was ultimately puzzling. Lack of editorial rigor, I suppose. The result was a bland amalgamation of pulp fiction and history, as though two books had been mistakenly bound as one. I'm glad I read it, because his attention to detail helped to inform my grasp of the subject and confirm my own work, but I cannot say that I was entertained.

Lynn Maria Laitala, however, has done a superb job with Down from Basswood. This book had escaped my attention since it came out in 2002, but was recently recommended by a local editor. Laitala is a trained historian, and I believe this book resulted from her dedicated effort to record the oral histories of members of the Finnish and Ojibwe communities near Ely, Minnesota. Down from Basswood is not threaded around a unifying plot; it is, rather, a series of interrelated short stories about individuals on the margins of the economy and civilization in the first half of the 20th century. Every chapter chronicles the small triumph or profound tragedy of a character, each informed by Laitala's astute take on the political dimensions of the time and the harsh economic climate. Laitala's sensibilities are unabashedly rooted in northeastern Minnesota's union/socialist tradition, but this book cannot be pigeonholed as a polemic--her touch is very light, her characters are not simply victims but fallible, and their plight is always uncertain. I continually found myself pleased by small writerly details, and I suppose stumbling upon passages that I wish I'd written is the heart of the reason why I read fiction.

Perhaps the genius behind Down from Basswood is the notion that documentaries, at best, are more compelling and moving than drama. Lynn Maria Laitala has managed to exploit the seam between the two. In so doing, she has written the best book about the Arrowhead region that I have read, and a volume that could sit confidently on the shelf beside Main Street, Giants in the Earth, North Star Country, or Staggerford.