"Ordinary Grace" More than a Mystery

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In William Kent Krueger's novel Ordinary Grace, deaths by "accident, nature, suicide, and murder" befall a small Minnesota town during the summer of 1961 when the narrator was just 13 years old. Yet for me, more gripping than any dramatic reveal of a corpse was Frank's realization about his younger brother: "You're my best friend, Jake. You're my best friend in the whole world. You always have been and you always will be" (196).

Though Krueger is author of the series featuring detective Cork O'Connor, and this novel won the mystery writers' "Edgar" award, the  mystery of who did it is secondary to another kind of mystery of grace in adversity.

[Image: William Kent Krueger. Ordinary Grace. New York: Atria, 2013.]

Our affection for some characters deepens throughout the novel. For example, Frank and his brother Jake "adore"(40) their older sister Ariel. She is "the hope and consummation of [their] mother's own unfilfilled longings," heading to Juilliard in the fall, dating the rich kid Karl Brandt, typing the memoir of Karl's uncle Emil, but always attentive to her little brothers. Frank sees that she has been sneaking out of the house at night, but he promises not to tell. When Frank comes home a mess from mischief that got out of hand, he finds her sobbing at the piano, unaware that he is watching:

"Frankie," she cried leaping from the bench. "Oh, Frankie, are you all right?"
She forgot in an instant whatever was the source of her own suffering and she turned all her attention on me. And I, in my selfish innocence, allowed it. (95)

The mystery of Ariel's sadness is the throughline for the story while Frank is involved in episodes with other town characters. Conflict simmers between daughter and mother about Ariel's decision not to attend Juilliard after all. There's a natural building up of tension in the preparation for the premiere of her original patriotic chorale for the town's Fourth of July, and the mystery of what has happened when she doesn't come home after the concert.

Another character, Gus, has as much growing up to do as Frank does, though Gus is a generation older. He's drunk the first time we see him, getting bailed out of jail by Frank's father, the pastor Nathan Drum. Gus calls the pastor "Captain," having served under him in the war, and Gus now serves him as gravedigger and handyman at the church. With a bad boy grin, he shows Frank how to eavesdrop on the pastor's office visits through the ductwork. But when he and his pal the odious Officer Doyle drag Frank into mischief involving alcohol, fireworks, and animal cruelty, Gus owns up to his part. It's a turning point in Gus's life; in every crisis that follows, Frank can rely on Gus.


Then there's Jake, sweet, empathetic to others, highly intuitive.


Jake's stammer makes him a victim of others in ways that Frank only begins to understand during this summer of 1961. Through Jake, Frank becomes more sensitive to other outsiders in town. That includes Warren, an itinerant Sioux Indian with family ties to a neighbor of the Drums, object of suspicion; the gentle but mentally slow boy Bobby; and even the town's rich man, Emil Brandt, blind and scarred by war, living with his sister Lise, deaf and autistic.


Frank's empathy encompasses even characters we hate. Mean Officer Doyle understands what Frank needs at a critical moment, and bends the law to help him (257). Frank overcomes his fear of a malevolent older teen named Morris Engdahl, who ends up an object of Frank's sympathy (304).


While Frank always reveres his father Nathan, he comes to appreciate his father's inner life, his wisdom and vulnerability. Inebriated, Gus says, "Captain, you're still a son of a bitch.... They're all dead because of you, Captain" (15); the boys wonder what Gus means, but don't ask. When the boys discover a corpse, Nathan opens up about the shock of seeing death on the battlefield, admitting "You never get used to it"(37). He is offering the boys a chance to share their feelings, but he "gave no sign that he was disappointed in our silence" (38). Trying to help the family of a veteran who abuses his wife and child, Nathan seems to seek fatherly counsel himself from Emil Brandt, a man blinded in war:

"Sometimes, Nathan, I think that it wasn't so much the war as what we took into the war. Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out.... You may have gone to war thinking you were going to be a hotshot lawyer afterward, but I believe that deep inside of you there was always the seed of a minister."
"And in you?"
"A blind man." Brandt smiled. (68)

Nathan handles pastoral duties with competence and compassion. Frank, eavesdropping on a counseling session with a contentious married couple, hears his father ask how they first met, redirecting them toward what drew them to each other in the first place (87). Eavesdropping again, Frank hears his father's calm, accepting response to a young man distraught about being a homosexual "freak" (243). When Frank sees his father, his tower of strength, weeping in a rainstorm (192), we weep, too. When, for once, the pastor is at a loss for words, there's a kind of miracle, the title's "ordinary grace"(270).

Aside from the pastor, statements about faith are largely negative. Frank's mother Ruth is a fan of Ayn Rand (18) and chronically disappointed that her "hotshot lawyer" came back from the war to be a poorly paid country preacher. When crisis hits the family, Ruth is so angry at Nathan for running to God, that she leaves him; Frank feels that he's praying to "empty air" (174); and Jake is so angry at God that he won't even bow his head at grace for meals (183). Ruth tells Frank, "There is no God to care about us. We've got only ourselves and each other" (224), but Frank thinks silently how faith had fortified his father. When things seems to be at their worst, Frank and Jake are uplifted simply by the "good scent of summer... the fresh wet of the laundry [on the] clothesline... the luscious mud smell of the river two blocks away" (237). Frank reflects at the funeral home how "ritual is the railing we hold to...that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past" (259). And Jake sums up everything he learns about "grace" when he says it means "not being afraid anymore" (282).


At the burial of a vagrant, the pastor speaks from the heart in his inspirational homily for just Frank and the pallbearers:

Even this man who is unknown to us was known to God and God was his constant companion. [God] never promised that we wouldn't suffer, that we wouldn't feel despair and loneliness and confusion and despeartion. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone. And though we may sometimes make ourselves blind and deaf to his presence he is beside us and around us and within us always. (71)

The sermon for his own daughter deepens that thought, taking off from the cry of Jesus on the cross, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

Aside from the story and its wisdom, Krueger's technical expertise gives the novel some highpoints of joy, when, in a single line, there's a fitting - into - place of theme, conversation, event. For example, at the conclusion of that chess game between Nathan and Emil, during which each move has been described aloud for the benefit of the blind man, all the threads of their conversation dovetail with the winning move (69). Another time, his mother takes his hand at the funeral, pulling together emotions and conversation and story in a gesture (258). Most satisfying of all is the moment, alluded to in the title, that ties together themes of faith, the story of a family, and the character of Jake.


As I review the book, typing this, I keep running across more details that I want to explore. This is one mystery novel that warrants reading again.

Thanks to my friend Nancy Calhoun for giving me her copy; I've already started to read Krueger's Iron Lake, first in his detective series.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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