North Dakota Classic

Beyond the Bedroom Wall By Larry Woiwode

Farrar, 619 pp., $12.50 Either Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a throwback to a literary tradition that has for the past couple of decades been pretty much awash in a flood of novels of a vastly different style, intent, and preoccupation, or it represents the triumphant surfacing of that tradition, vigorous with renewed intent and fat with promise for the future. It is almost shocking, in this year of grace 1975, to pick up a novel whose characters are not Jewish boys masturbating on the Broadway bus, or frenzied college professors jetting from New York’s Upper West Side to Chicago to resolve the problems of an intellectual’s marriage, or girls abandoned to the swamps of the Third Avenue singles bars. Woiwode’s book is a world hewn from the North Dakota sod, decorated with frame houses and peopled with carpenters, high-school superintendents, and Catholics. Its style alternates between the stark, clean functionalism of a cabinetmaker turned literatus, and the refulgent lyricism of a poet whose talent is a Ministry of All the Senses and who thus provides new proof of the fact that a genius for unimpeded multi-sensual association is the font of all fine writing. Woiwode works with the American grain, and he does so with the sort of serenity of execution that Norman Podhoretz noted in the writing of Edmund Wilson and attributed to Wilson’s sense of himself as a man sustained by and at the same time forwarding a richly secure tradition.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Beyond the Bedroom Wall By Larry Woiwode

Farrar, 619 pp., $12.50 Either Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a throwback to a literary tradition that has for the past couple of decades been pretty much awash in a flood of novels of a vastly different style, intent, and preoccupation, or it represents the triumphant surfacing of that tradition, vigorous with renewed intent and fat with promise for the future. It is almost shocking, in this year of grace 1975, to pick up a novel whose characters are not Jewish boys masturbating on the Broadway bus, or frenzied college professors jetting from New York’s Upper West Side to Chicago to resolve the problems of an intellectual’s marriage, or girls abandoned to the swamps of the Third Avenue singles bars. Woiwode’s book is a world hewn from the North Dakota sod, decorated with frame houses and peopled with carpenters, high-school superintendents, and Catholics. Its style alternates between the stark, clean functionalism of a cabinetmaker turned literatus, and the refulgent lyricism of a poet whose talent is a Ministry of All the Senses and who thus provides new proof of the fact that a genius for unimpeded multi-sensual association is the font of all fine writing. Woiwode works with the American grain, and he does so with the sort of serenity of execution that Norman Podhoretz noted in the writing of Edmund Wilson and attributed to Wilson’s sense of himself as a man sustained by and at the same time forwarding a richly secure tradition.