Roman-fleuve

Red River, East Grand Forks, N.D.

In the cramped seat of a plane flying back from a family vacation in Minnesota in July 2008, I created the three protagonists of the novels that would occupy me for the next twelve years. Siblings born in northern states who fan out across the country as they grow up, Line, Marty and Paul have a Scandinavian heritage and an openness to the world fueled by their parents and their generation.

I began working full time on the novels in 2011 and in 2015, almost ten years ago, I was able to publish the first four. The final novel was published in 2020. Since publishing, I have had plenty of time to think about the context of this project as it stands. It isn’t perfect, of course, but I find I don’t want to change anything. It is what it is. You can find my website detailing these books and others here.

A roman-fleuve, or “river novel” is an extended sequence of novels which continually deals with a central character, community or the saga of a family. The river metaphor suggests a steady, broad dynamic with an inherent perspective creating its flow. I was thrilled to find this description, which has been applied to many 19th and 20th century novel sequences, and certainly describes my series, the overall title of which is So Are You to My Thoughts.

Stumbling on the concept of exogamy recently, I also find the series describes a time in which a generation (including my three protagonists) finds mates outside the culture in which they grew up. These cross-cultural couplings result in new families, stretching the original one, but ultimately resulting in a powerful, diverse basis for a new extended family. The children of strong, whole-hearted families create strong, whole-hearted families for themselves, despite the many vicissitudes this may involve.

Like any writer who follows their characters, but knows them intimately, I was sometimes surprised by them. When I began I did not expect the form to stay the same throughout, but thought it might, like a river, be diverted by the characters, the story moving into eddies and shoals. But, in the end, the text rolled on, continuing to pass the point of view from one character to another, though we glimpse the siblings in each other’s stories.

Inner pressure compelled me to write and publish the novels, which have, in some respects, yet to make their way in the world. As the notable storyteller Abraham Verghese says, “The writer provides the words. The reader provides their imagination. What’s created in the middle space is there.”

I have been well aware that realism in novels is not particularly desirable at the moment. We are in a time when escape, a desire to be “anywhere but here,” is what people want. In the Mikkelson family, however, in the arc of the characters I follow, reality, the life we have in common with each other, is generally enough. I have loved realistic fiction since parents and teachers first read us the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which were coming out in a new edition when I was in grade school. Tattered copies of these books littered our house. And I am sure that one day readers will again be interested in realism and want to know how families once worked.

In honor of the almost ten years some of the novels have been available, I have been re-reading them. I also decided to post brief summaries of each chapter on the blog I have kept regarding the novel series. These summaries are in no way a substitute for reading the novels, but I do feel they can be used as reminders of where things are, or when they happened. They are pointers, as are most blog posts. They might also be used by readers who only have the attention for one of the novels, yet want to know what happens to the characters. 

Each chapter is a short story which furthers the arc of the characters, or reflects on a time and place. They do require attention. Or, put another way, the more attention the reader is able to give them, the more the stories repay. I believe the novels in this series are worth living in, worth re-reading. Again, Verghese says, “Stories are equipment for living. They are how we connect with each other.”

People may think they already know everything there is to know about people with a Northern European heritage, but the Mikkelsons may surprise you. Against all odds, they do not have materialistic values. Have we lost interest in goodness, truth and beauty? Or are we too shell-shocked by today’s conflicts to trust in them? The Mikkelsons, believe me, play a long game, rooted in present time, but animated by wholeness.

And the river flows ever onward. We mostly take the great gift of language for granted. We can play with it, delight in it and dance with it. But it is also a kind of trust. It was Camus who first said that “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Let us not hesitate to infuse our language with the truth of our own experience, in both its detail and its transcendence.