He unfolds the complexities, tragedies, and heroism of everyday folks, who are the nation's strength though usually snubbed by the intelligentsia. Woiwode is celebrating the lives of ordinary small-town people-farmers, high-school teachers, construction workers, insurance salesmen, housewives-with not a trace of condescension. But the novel is different in other ways from most contemporary fiction. Certain details shock-for example, a motif of little brother, little sister incest will make nearly any reader squirm. The mood is relatively bleak, like most contemporary literary fiction. It is experimental-told from multiple points of view, jumping back and forth in time, lacking a single narrative center or plot line. Woiwode a basketload of literary prizes, fellowships, writer-in-residence posts at major colleges, and a regular gig writing for The New Yorker. It's clear why the literary establishment thought so highly of the novel, giving Mr. The story begins in the 1930s with Charles Neumiller having to wash his father's body for burial, and continues through the years as his son Martin grows up, gets married, goes to work, and has children of his own-whom we also watch growing up through the 1960s. Then he blew away the critics with Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975), a chronicle of four generations of a North Dakota family. Woiwode won acclaim from the secular literary establishment for his very first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think (1969), about honeymooners in an empty, doomed marriage. This reveling in the actual places him in a long tradition of Christian writers, from Thomas Traherne to Gerard Manley Hopkins to G.K. Woiwode has said that the very facticity of nature, the hard-edged details of everyday life, partakes of God's glory. The natural landscape, too, he writes about in evocative detail, seemingly for its own sake. His approach to writing seems to be to take people, usually drawn from the sort he knew-or was-from his North Dakota childhood, put them into a vividly described environment, and let them unfold, developing them inside and out, following their seemingly ordinary lives for good or for ill. He is not only realistic he may be too realistic. He often depicts dirty minds and dirty words and dirty deeds. Woiwode holds to a rigorous, conservative Reformed theology, he is not a stereotypical Puritan. Though he often quotes the Bible and has his characters wrestling with religion, he seldom uses his plots to dramatize an explicitly Christian theme. Many Christian readers will thus find Mr. Ideas might emerge from the story, but it is primarily the people, the setting, and the action that the novelist must concentrate on. Novels are about characters and the interaction between them. It isn't that ideas are unimportant, but that the proper form for them is the essay. Woiwode says that novels aren't supposed to be about ideas-they are supposed to be about people. Realism-describing the world God has made, in all of its human-made imperfections-is the best form for Christian fiction, he maintains.
Christians, he argues, should be oriented to reality, not escapist fantasies. This careful plainness is the opposite of glltz: his work is solid and perfectly finished and sometimes so heartbreaking only its beauty could persuade you to endure its pain.Larry Woiwode has chided Christian readers and writers for their infatuation with fantasy. His style is dazzling and quiet at once like a highly efficient engine, his language has the power to lift you very high before you know it. His characters endure death, birth, illness and the instability of love. Through twenty-five years of storytelling is a sign of his fiction's depth. Short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and other periodicals since the sixties, has been included in four editions of Best American Short Stories (the most recent being "Silent Passengers," the title story of this collection), and has received the Aga Khan Literary Prize from The Paris Review and in 1990 his Neumiller Stories received the Southern Review/LSU Award for Short Fiction, the citation for which reads (in part): "The constancy of Woiwode's concerns Although he is known chiefly for his novels, Larry Woiwode's The stories collected here in Silent Passengers - spare, intense, tender - display his widely acknowledged talents to the greatest effect. Wanting an orange - A necessary nap - Winter insects - Owen's father - Summer storms - Sleeping over - Confessionals - Blindness - Silent passengers - Black winterįamilies on the land - mothers, fathers, children, all living beneath the exultant and demanding skies of the northern Great Plains - these are the people who populate Larry Woiwode's works and who have helped secure his celebrated place in contemporary American writing.
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