Books
What can go wrong with 80 acres, 20 cows, a bull, and a pickup?
The Farmer's Daughter
Nicole Lea Helget
The Summer of Ordinary Ways
Borealis Books
Nicole Lea Helget grew up on a farm near Sleepy Eye, one of the great town names in all of Minnesota. If Helget's first book were a novel, readers would accuse her of high irony: How else could that bucolic name describe a place of puppy murder, cattle torture, hellfire Catholic sermons, and other varieties of rural despair? Yet Helget has written a memoir, and the words Sleepy Eye will never sound the same.
Having grown up on a farm not far from a Minnesota town encrusted with mythic significance--Walnut Grove, home of Laura Ingalls Wilder--I know a little about southern Minnesota gothic. A previous owner of our farm, a chronic drunk blasted on cheap booze, rolled off his tractor and ran himself over. Suicide runs in my extended family like hemophilia among the European royals. Losing the farm is usually the great tragedy of rural American life. Looking back, I sometimes think it was the best thing that happened to us. I may have grown up in a little house on the prairie, but it was a haunted little house.
I've been waiting years for someone to write the great sweeping tragedy of that lost life, that flat and lonely farmland prettified beyond recognition by a TV series shot in the hills of California. Instead of an epic, Helget has given us something closer to gemlike haiku: Her memoir, The Summer of Ordinary Ways, serves up farm life raw, with its undercurrents of sex and violence brought to the fore.
Helget will practice her earliest seduction on the milkman at the age of eight. She will take her first sip of booze from a neighbor named Moonshine, an old man with "seven or eight teeth the color and size of coffee beans." She will be warned by the priest of "dirty needles planted under gas pump handles by bitter homosexuals with AIDS," and "murderous Democrats" responsible for a holocaust of fetuses. She will watch her parents go half-mad with disappointment and longing, and she will survive to write this book, a gift of close attention bestowed on a corner of the world that may not see it as a gift. I kept thinking of the words of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz: "When a writer is born into a family, the family is doomed."
Here, the tragedy is not losing the farm, but falling back on it. Helget's father suffered the Curse of the Bambino, at one remove. Drafted by the Red Sox out of Sleepy Eye St. Mary's High School, he spent several years in the team's farm system, never making a splash in the bigs. In 1977 he was cut and returned to Minnesota, to his birthright as a son of German farmers: 80 acres, 20 cows, a bull, and a pickup truck.
Helget begins with a display of her father's rage, as he stabs a milk cow to death for refusing to separate from its calf. The scene is bloody and cinematic; it gains its power in part from the jump-cut style of the narrative. Helget moves easily from scenes of playing catch with her father on the lawn to the bloodbath in the barn. The connection between his failure in baseball and his attack on the cow is never made explicit. It doesn't need to be. One of the great pleasures of Helget's style is her mature belief in the intuitive intelligence of her readers--a rarity for a writer so young (Helget is 29 and has been writing for two years).
There are, generally speaking, three kinds of autobiography. There's the social memoir, in which the writer uses personal experience to leap into larger issues (see Joan Didion's Where I Was From, which examines the history of California through the experiences of Didion's family); and the nonfiction coming-of-age tale, which uses the techniques of fiction--dramatic scenes and realistic dialogue--to tell a story of character development over a discrete period of time (think of Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life). The trickiest variety of all is the memory collage, which relies on the accumulation of detail and the evocative power of language to tease connections out of the bingo hopper of memory.
Helget's reminiscence plays out as a masterful example of the last, alternating between the early 1980s and early 1990s. It reminds us, by its very form, that the best writing is not merely the transcription of life as it's lived--such a project would be interminable, with its long stretches of remembered boredom, its painstaking descriptions of twice-daily bowel movements--but an act of sifting, sorting, prioritizing. In this case, the reader is not merely led by the hand to an illumination, as if a book were a hike uphill with a sweeping view from the top. The payoff arrives on every page, in the pleasing rhythms of the sentences, the fineness of the imagery.