A LESSER LIGHT

A loveless marriage runs aground at a Lake Superior lighthouse.

From the beginning of Geye’s novel, it’s clear that the marriage of Willa and Theodulf Sauer is deeply flawed. The year is 1910, and Theodulf has recently taken a position as the keeper of a new lighthouse overlooking Lake Superior. He takes his job very seriously, at one point telling Willa, “My responsibilities are first to God, then to the Lighthouse Service, then to you.” Willa, a scientifically minded woman with a penchant for the piano, is frustrated by her husband’s beliefs and his controlling tendencies. Late in the book, she reflects on how they came to marry, pondering that “it was less a courtship than a mugging.” When she meets a girl named Silje and her uncle, Mats, Willa finds people with whom she can be more herself; eventually, she and Mats begin an affair. In a series of flashbacks to 1900 and 1905, Geye recounts an earlier encounter between Theodulf and Willa, as well as a trip to Paris when Theodulf met a man for whom he continues to pine years after they parted. The death of Theodulf’s father provides another shift in this book’s interpersonal dynamics: “How was it that not a single emotion coursed through him save a slight peevishness at needing to leave his post?” Both halves of the unhappy couple demonstrate different sides in conversations with their respective mothers, and Geye illustrates his characters’ contradictory aspects well. There’s also an impressive attention to detail and some knowing humor, as when one character says, “Fathers and sons, the Russians write novels about them.” This isn’t an epic Russian novel, but it might be a Minnesotan take on one.

A meticulously told story of flawed people seeking connection.