AEGOLIUS CREEK

A defiant man fights for his right to continue logging on his property in Thorp’s novel.

Don Karlsson, a logger, is first introduced to readers raising his middle finger to a crew of firefighters. Don, who “spent most of his childhood doing precisely whatever he was told not to do,” became more responsible after marrying and having three children, but his anti-authority streak remains. Whether they be firefighters, a professor in search of a new species, or the local sheriff, Don treats everyone who steps foot on his property with suspicion, expressing his feelings in a sporadic Faulkner-lite internal monologue: “That’s when I see them lawmen for the first time. Serious lookin’ fellas. When one shows up, he’s here for a talk. When it’s more than one, it’s certain they’re takin’ someone with ‘em with they leave.” When a new species of vole is discovered on his property, Don is prevented from cutting down any of the trees that he’s planted there throughout his life. To gain back his freedom (as he sees it), Don calls on his three adult children, all with differing opinions on his best course of action. What follows turns into a legal thriller, with informants and major revelations in trial scenes. Though the narrative moves in a more conventional direction in the second half, Thorp’s novel is distinctive in its layering of facts about the geography, the aforementioned shifts into Don’s perspective, and a deep bench of side characters brought richly to life. If the pacing occasionally stalls as the text is interrupted by departures into descriptions of nature, the prose is often beautiful: “The house with its tin roof and clapboard siding, dirty and decaying, is the remnant of a dream, an embodiment of one man’s struggle to find a place in the world, a tiny corner of the great globe he could once and forever call his own.”

A surprising and moving account of a man’s connection to his home.