The stories are as rich as the landscapes are bleak in a pair of recently published novels.
By Elisabeth Crean
In fiction, inhospitable landscapes make fertile settings for emotional journeys. Coming of age on the gritty London streets shapes Pip in Great Expectations; living on the edge of untamed New England wilderness fortifies Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. Characters define their inner strengths by overcoming external obstacles.
Lapland—the Arctic North of Scandinavia—is one of the world’s most forbidding inhabited environments. In Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007), Vendela Vida ’93 sends Clarissa 
Iverton, the troubled protagonist of her second novel, to this remote frontier where reindeer outnumber the native Sami people. Clarissa arrives in the middle of winter, when the sun has disappeared below the horizon and light itself is fleeting, spectral, and surreal. Layers of snow reflect and refract beams from the stars, Volvo headlights, and scattered strands of Christmas bulbs.
At 28, Clarissa brings weighty baggage to Lapland after her father’s recent death. From her parents, she has experienced the two deepest wounds that family can inflict: abandonment and betrayal. Above the Arctic Circle, she is desperately searching for a new biological connection, someone who must love her because DNA dictates it.
Fourteen years earlier, Clarissa’s mother, Olivia, disappeared when the two were Christmas shopping at a Poughkeepsie mall. The teenager had taken a few extra minutes picking out her mom’s present and was late for their appointed rendezvous. Olivia told the clerk at the meeting point that she was “tired of waiting,” and vanished forever. Clarissa’s father, Richard, was left to raise Clarissa and her disabled younger brother, Jeremy.
The novel’s action begins on the day the adult Clarissa buries her father. In going through his papers, she finds that Richard’s name is not on her birth certificate. Her fiancé, Pankaj—who is an old childhood friend—awkwardly confesses that his family knew Richard wasn’t really her father. Clarissa enters an emotional tailspin. Who else knew? How can she trust anyone who has been lying to her all these years? What she doesn’t realize is that this is just the first lie in a carefully spun web of deceit.
Clarissa’s birth certificate bears the name of her mother’s first husband, a Sami priest. She flees New York, telling no one where she’s going, and bearing her own secret: she’s pregnant. The long journey north taxes her body and spirit. And the answers she finds are more painful than the questions she first brought with her. “I felt like a shattered window—at any moment, at the slightest provocation, the pieces would fall to the ground, hard as hail.”
A reindeer herder named Henrik eventually finds Clarissa passed out on a frozen river and takes her, feverish and frail, to his aunt’s house. Anna Kristine, an elderly Sami healer, ministers gently to the woman who has had little maternal tenderness in her lifetime. Even without a common language, the women discover a surprising and difficult bond. “I thought of the missing pictures in Anna Kristine’s photo album, the dried glue that framed their absence. I recognized the desire to erase someone.”
Although Clarissa faces harrowing revelations, Vida’s spare, deft prose lifts her tale away from the maudlin or melodramatic. The lean imagery is vivid. An old cemetery has “tombstones like teeth.” Houses on the train ride from Helsinki are “the color of Viking ships in children’s books—utterly confident blues, reds, yellows.”
Vida’s brisk pace and unsentimental tone underscore Clarissa’s discovery that healing means confronting—and then detaching from—pain, not wallowing in it. Clarissa learns Sami remedies for surviving cold temperatures: layers of clothing, warming fires, hot lingonberry juice. But for a cold temperament, whether encoded in DNA or etched in tragic circumstance, she finds there is no cure—only forgiveness.
How well can we ever really know someone, even ourselves?
Kate Colter feels this question pulsing in the background of her life. The New Englander happily jumps off a career-oriented track, much to her mother’s dismay, to marry a paleontologist and move to his native Wyoming. George is away for weeks at a time on fossil digs, and Kate busies herself with the routines of motherhood and part-time work, keeping a rancher’s books and nursing injured horses.
As the narrator in Along Comes a Stranger (HarperCollins, 2007), the quietly compelling debut novel of Dorie McCullough Lawson ’90, Kate is reluctant to admit that discontent is seeping into the edges of her tranquil domesticity. She has adjusted to the anxiety of managing her daughter Clara’s life-threatening metabolic disorder while preserving the child’s sense of normalcy. She accepts her husband’s long absences as an inescapable part of his job. She can even deal with her cross-stitch-crazed, Wal Mart-loving mother-in-law, Lorraine, who means well and really loves Clara.
Yet Kate feels detached from the cultural rhythms of Wyoming, where the coal mines close just once a year—for the opening day of elk-hunting season. At parties, folks debate optimal driving directions, a hot topic in a large state with the mindset of “a small town with very, very long roads.” No one pesters Kate with pointed personal questions. But she begins to find that “those things that so appealed to me in the beginning tend to be what can annoy me most now.”
Privacy has become isolation. Kate misses the lively conversation and sense of connection that she felt back east. Her closest friendship, with her Aunt Joan, plays out over the phone. She banters with the high-powered Boston executive about Joan’s serial dating disasters and lurid, big-city crime stories.
And then a kindred spirit materializes one summer in Wyoming: Tom Baxter, an engaging older gentleman who starts dating the widowed Lorraine. Tom is witty, caring, and bright, and keenly interested in people and places around him. He inspires Kate to visit a nearby Indian battlefield, reanimating its history for Kate and Clara with a vivid personal tour.
But Tom’s eye for detail begins to bother Kate. He masters license plate numbers, positions of objects in a room, and descriptions of people with offhanded ease. Kate wonders if his precision represents a limber intellect, or something more sinister. Small elements of his background don’t add up. Have years of idle talk about tabloid crime made her paranoid? Or could Baxter really be a dangerous fugitive? Kate’s joking reminder to Joan haunts the increasingly anxious mom: “Don’t forget what Shakespeare said. ‘The prince of darkness is a gentleman.’ ”
Lawson laces her narrative with gentle insights into people. Growing up, Kate learns about horses from a “maiden New England lady who seemed to like animals better than people.” Clara’s babysitter reminds Kate of older sisters from the pioneer era, “more like a young mother than a teenager.” Relationships face limitations, even in loving families. “People connect with other people in the ways they can. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it takes an effort.”
Above all, Lawson generates compassion for her richly drawn characters. Their flaws disguise hidden strengths, and their talents hide terrible secrets. Lawson’s skill is that she makes us care about all of them, even after the mystery boils over in Wyoming’s searing summer heat.
Recently Published
Thinking About Tomorrow: Reinventing Yourself at Midlife (Warner Wellness, 2007) by Susan Crandell ’73
The Blue Zone (William Morrow, 2007) by Andrew Gross ’74
The Melting of Maggie Bean (Simon & Schuster, 2007) by Tricia Rayburn ’00