Throughout her life, in fiction and in public forums, Minnesota's Carol Bly made a practice of saying the sorts of things that most people keep to themselves for fear of ruining a perfectly good cocktail party. Keep it light, don't offend, we are trained.
In her last and posthumously published work, "Shelter Half," her first novel, we are once again treated to Bly's reverberating, admonishing, funny and intelligent pronouncements on human foibles, class snobbery, corporate atrocities, domestic terrors and workplace bullies. Most important, we are reminded of the necessity and the difficulty of summoning courage -- to choose not to be complicit in wrongdoing on any scale.
If this makes her novel sound preachy or, worse, strident, never fear. She pulls off a well-crafted page-turner, steeped in rural Minnesota character and sensibilities, that still has the moral heft of a Reinhold Niebuhr sermon.
"Shelter Half," set in contemporary St. Fursey, a town on the Iron Range, opens with a local German immigrant, Dieter Stolz, hauling a wounded hunter to his pickup truck. Because of his accent, the locals regard Stolz as "a character," and, because of his shady history during World War II, he is a frequent target of their suspicions.
The hunter is Brad Stropp, whose ankle has been caught in a small-animal trap. He's a rageful, wife-beating, trigger-happy ingrate -- the sort you don't want to encounter on a woodsy trek. While responding to Stropp's cries for help, Stolz spies the body of a woman, dead for more than a week, he figures, based on "his knowledge of exposed corpses ... now over a half-century old." He keeps the discovery to himself, for now.
The dead woman becomes the connecting but not the overriding concern of the novel.
Subsequent chapters are told from the alternating, limited points of view of the town's many Bly-esque characters: a VFW hostess who knows how to stop a bar fight, a worldwise but not cynical police chief, an honest auto dealer who knows he's dying of cancer and whose beloved black Lab (one of his few comforts in life) has been stolen, a privileged pillar of the community who is more concerned with his heirloom desk than his wife's silent agonies, a senior citizen who should not be underestimated. Finally, there is Imogen, one of the book's most sympathetic characters. She is a social worker and peace activist whose past contains a terrible loss she can't confront: the accidental death of her infant son.
As warned, Bly sometimes cannot help herself. Take this deliciously over-the-top meditation on new-fallen snow, for example: "The new snow said, 'This is really just the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first, when the males of every household hitched horse to sleigh and everybody glided over to Grandmother's house. The males are not incompetent or sadistic. The males are very caretaking fathers. The world is not overpopulated. The streets of neither St. Fursey nor Duluth, Minnesota, are salted, and America, a republic, protects its poor from the hobby wars of the rich."
