The Farmer's Daughter

Helget, who teaches writing at Minnesota State University in Mankato and recently won Minnesota Monthly's Tamarack Prize for fiction, has crafted a prose style a little like the best lyrics of Uncle Tupelo: sparely lyrical, beautifully melancholy. Although her father is an alcoholic, her mother an embittered farm wife made alternately furious and mute by the drudgery of caring for six rambunctious daughters, Helget never resorts to caricature in depicting their struggles. Whether they're waging a domestic cold war over her father's drinking, or arguing over her mother's disgust at the nuisance of 13 puppies birthed by the family mutt, both parents come across as sympathetic, if frustrated. Often their most shocking acts are described in an unaffected, unsurprised voice:

Dad shot the puppies in the milkroom of the dairy barn. I sat on the gravel outside the barn door, legs stretched long, picking the dead scab on my elbow. Annie Jo chewed a tomato on the cottonwood stump near Mom's garden, legs crossed Indian style. She palmed and ate it like an apple and red juice slipped down her chin and onto her chest, shirtless and bony, like a little boy's. When I tucked my knees into a chin rest, the waves of my shorts wrinkled around my hips, gravel grains clung to the backs of my thighs and calves. I wiped them off and passed my fingers over the dips they left in my skin. Grasshoppers sparked around me on the dry barnyard grass.... One tangled in my hair just as the first shell popped from the .410 shotgun and the noise squeezed my lungs, took my air. I unwound the struggling grasshopper from a curl and heard dad release and reload the gun. The remaining puppies yipped and scurried. Their tails tip-tapped the concrete under the echo of shot and barks. I pinched the grasshopper between my thumb and finger, and a runny mess dripped even as its legs still twitched.

Rarely will you see the less-is-more principle executed so beautifully. No high-flown rhetoric, no attempt to explain in sweeping terms what it all meant: By counterpoising the killing of the puppies with the killing of a single helpless grasshopper, Helget reveals in miniature the impulse of a child to mimic the behavior of the adults she loves.

 

In the industry trade bible Publisher's Weekly, Hans Weyandt, owner of Micawber Books in St. Paul, compared The Summer of Ordinary Ways to Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. And although both memoirs make something large and resonant out of the dark little dramas of domesticity, it's a comparison that does neither justice. Allison's memoir is much darker and contains not a single false note. Helget's book is both funnier and more lyrical--sometimes too lyrical. She occasionally lingers like a voyeur over scenes of mayhem and blood, as when her father gores the recalcitrant milk cow with a pitchfork: "[The blood] soaked around the holes, then spread, staining Big Jenny's white fur first red and then dirty orange, like food coloring stretching in water. Deep in the middle, lighter on the periphery.... She still stood in a striped coat of blood like a strange hybrid of pansies Mom planted once, dark and white and red."

Here we see the more-is-less principle in action. One or the other image would probably suffice.

But this is a mild objection, and perhaps oversensitive. For the most part Helget resists melodrama and saccharine sentimentality. She has taken material heretofore owned by Garrison Keillor--rural life in Minnesota, with its ethnic oddity and quietly fierce religion--and delivered it without the mediating voice of satire. The result is a startling portrait of life on the farm in all its weirdness, and more affecting for being true.

Of course, fidelity to the truth can have its hazards. "Writers are always selling people out," Didion once wrote, and it's intriguing to wonder what the Helget family makes of their portrayal. If this is an example of selling people out, it's as sensitive as it can be done, and I'm sure as hell buying.