PIGEON FALLS

In Elzinga’s novel, an ailing construction surveyor takes a job rife with complications and wrestles with loneliness and his looming mortality.

Forty-something Tom Bishop loves his job working as a surveyor for Midwest Stable Platforms, a company that builds the foundations for wind turbines, “those tall spindly brigades of white acrobats you’ve seen cartwheeling across the landscape of rural America.” Divorced for nearly 20 years—his marriage to Paige only lasted three—he finds solace in his “nomadic lifestyle,” traveling wherever the home office sends him, a lonesomeness that Elzinga renders unsentimentally but poignantly. His current job is in Pigeon Falls, a small, friendly village in Wisconsin that affords its visitors “absolute quiet” during its sleepy evenings. However, the client, Burnell Sandberg, is not peaceful; in fact, he’s a “a sad man with an appetite for creating conflict when none is necessary.” He wants the foundations for two turbines to be built before the freeze arrives—a very challenging task for Tom that isn’t made any easier by Burnell’s truculence. However, the compensation is excellent, and the hard work distracts Tom from anxieties about the pending results of some medical tests. He suffers from terrible abdominal pain and suspects they’re caused by something life-threatening—a terrifying prospect for a man without a family to offer him comfort. Meanwhile, a young restaurant server, Candace Cane, who reminds Tom of Paige, is being physically abused by her husband; one of Tom’s crewmates, Eddie, a hardworking teenager, begins a friendship with her that promises to bloom into more—a frightening and complex predicament, delicately conveyed by the author. There’s a moving strain of melancholy that runs through the entire book, especially in the tension between hope and resignation. The thoughtful Candace, who’s taking philosophy classes, tries to balance the two in her own understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche’s amor fati—one must learn to love one’s destiny, whatever it is. Overall, this is a deeply engrossing, if heartbreaking, tale that impressively refuses to succumb to melodrama.

A sensitive story that’s admirably free of sentimentality.