Why read Ordinary Grace ?

Ordinary Grace swept up awards when it was published in 2013 including the Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and the book made it onto Time magazine’s 100 Best Mysteries and Thriller Books of All Time list.

From the Discussion Guide on the author’s website.

“In 1961 New Bremen, Minnesota, all is quiet and serene. The Minnesota River flows through the countryside, the town barber knows everyone’s name, and folks dutifully attend church every Sunday. But that serenity is thrown into turmoil as a series of tragic deaths lead thirteen-year-old Frank Drum and his family on a hunt for terrible truths. But at what cost comes wisdom?”

Set in the fictional town of New Bremen, in the very real Minnesota river valley, Krueger delivers a powerful look at life in that time and place. The author is known for a long-running traditional mystery series featuring a small-town sheriff, also set in Minnesota. It’s a place he obviously knows well.

Here he reaches much deeper and pushes the boundaries of what a mystery is and does–by combining one with a coming-of-age story set in a hot summer, just sixteen years after World War Two. The narrator tells the story several decades later which gives him perspective on many of the events. Krueger lets the reader know what they’re in for, right in the pages of the Prologue.

“Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.”

That’s a lot of death, and there are many mysteries about those losses to solve. Perhaps too many. Except Krueger does this in fine style.

Analysis

What follows is a spoiler-dense analysis of what happens in the novel. So that’s just a warning–If you’re looking for a traditional review, there are plenty of places online to read about the book. And it gets great reviews. Also, I’m not going to explain the process I’m using below beforehand. Y’all will figure it out as we go along.

The Time Period

Setting a book in the early 1960s is a choice with a great deal of precedent. If you were born in the 1990s or afterward, you may only be cursorily familiar with the heavily idealized view of this time-period in the US. It’s one that has persisted and permeated American culture. Television shows made during the period like Leave it to Beaver still air on TV and streaming channels every night. Movies such as Grease and American Graffiti, and shows like Happy Days later looked back and soaked the period in nostalgia for car culture, rock and roll music, and teenage summertime freedom.

There’s also many books that delve into the problems facing America during this period. These include the struggle for the end of segregation and toward equal and fair treatment for Black Americans. Also, the continued struggle for women’s rights. Plus, the rising protests against the US military involvement in Southeast Asia.

This period probably has been studied, analyzed, praised, criticized, and written about more than any in US history. At least it seems this way to the generations who’ve followed. Which is why setting a story in 1961 is a nuanced choice. It’s just before a lot of the significant events of the era. Small town Minnesota is a little far from the protests and boycotts in the South, and from college campuses where the culture was changing. It’s a world that hadn’t responded to change, and still played by the rules of an older era.

It’s reasonable to call it an innocent time. This is where Krueger places his story.

The Town

New Bremen is a town with few newcomers, in a community where farmers grow up and spend their whole lives. Teenager Frank Drum’s father is from elsewhere. Frank’s mother, Ruth, grew up in New Bremen, but left for college to study music and drama. There she met Nathan Drum, from the busy city of Duluth, and they married just as he finished law school.

The main residential areas of New Bremen are the Heights and the Flats. The well-to-do and wealthy live up on the Heights and everyone else lives in the Flats. Other key areas include the marshy area by the river, and the railroad tracks, including a railroad trestle. The first and second deaths occur along the railroad tracks and trestle, so those places immediately seem dangerous, and Frank and his younger brother Jake are warned by their parents to stay away from them. Needless to say, this only increases the appeal of going there.

Exploring the Story World of Ordinary Grace

Ordinary Grace is Frank Drum’s story about the one awful summer where he came of age amongst so much death. It’s unlike the film it is often compared to–Stand by Me–in a most significant way. Stand by Me is a story about the twilight of teenaged friendship, Ordinary Grace is a book where Frank and his younger brother Jake gain access to the world of adults largely for the first time, and what they learn about the dark and confusing way the adult world behaves.

A simple explanation of the book would be that it’s the story of conflict between the Drums, an average-income family living in New Bremen’s Flats, and the wealthy and troubled Brandt family, living in the Heights. Which is an adequate description of the book. But here at Story Worlds I’m looking at the larger framework on which it all hangs.

Ordinary Grace features four distinct groups of people:

1. Characters who have no fixed home or reliable income
2. Characters who live in the Flats area and have a home and a source of income
3. The well-to-do who live a better lifestyle than most and reside up in the Heights. This includes Frank’s grandparents.
4. The wealthy, who live in an area set apart from everyone. This is just the Brandt family

The characters from the first group, who have no fixed home, figure prominently in the story. The second death is a man found in the river who comes to be labeled “the itinerant”. No one knows who he is or where he was from or how he came to be floating dead in the river. For a time, the mystery of who this man might be is important to Jake and the people of the town, but after he’s given a dignified burial, his presence there fades from most people’s minds.

Except Frank’s.

Thirteen-year-old Frank Drum is at such a pivotal moment in a young person’s life that the events of that summer persist in his memory. There’s isn’t much for Frank and his brother to do so they spend a lot of their days following adults around, listening in on their conversation when allowed, and eavesdropping when they aren’t.

This means that in scene after scene Frank is observing the behavior of two very different people. His father and his mother.

His mother, Ruth, struggles to flourish in the town she grew up in. Perhaps it’s unfair that she’s been thrown back to a community she’d planned to leave behind. Her past musical ambitions dissolved into a singular focus on the future career of her daughter, a talented musician on her way to Juilliard.

Ruth serves the community by leading the choirs in her husband’s three churches and other musical groups in town. She also has a close relationship with the community’s musical standout, Emil Brandt, part of the wealthy Brandt family. It would seem this would be a full life, but it’s clear to young Frank that his mother is dissatisfied with many things—with her daily life, with the town, but mostly with her husband, Nathan.

Nathan Drum is a pastor for several local churches and he’s at peace with his life of service to the people of New Bremen. Nathan travels effortlessly between the four economic groups above. It could be said, he travels gracefully. Which should be difficult in a time with so much conflict and tragedy.

While true, Nathan gave up a potential law career and financial success to live in the Flats–next to the kind of people that attend his church–but he never shows regret or aspires to do anything other than be a minister. Frank watches how his father cares for people in the community–whether it’s taking a late-night phone call about a drunk who’s been thrown into jail, or playing chess with a former musical wunderkind Emil Brandt, who lost his eyesight in the war.

Nathan counts both of those men among his friends.

But should he?

Emil Brandt is a talented musician and composer, who long ago fled life in New Bremen, pursuing a career as a professional musician in New York, and then later, Hollywood. He rubbed elbows with some of the musical greats of the era, only to be brought down by injury and resulting blindness from the war. It might make sense for Nathan to give some of his time to play chess each week on Brandt’s porch. Except for one thing.

Emil Brandt was once engaged to Nathan’s wife Ruth.

That history is not something that seems to bother Nathan in the least, though it’s certainly a source of tension for the reader. After chapters of seeing Nathan encounter conflicts like this and experience tragedy both inside and outside his family, he’s a man that should be shaken, bruised, and broken.

Instead, he sails through those moments, concerned mostly for the welfare of others.

The Parents’ Conflict

Eventually, this becomes the breaking point between him and Ruth. She’s angry at the God that Nathan serves, and how his beliefs protect him from the damage the world heaps on nearly everyone they know. When tragedy strikes their family, she’s had enough and leaves Nathan for her parents’ home in the Heights.

If Nathan was ever going to have an irrational and emotional reaction to an event, that should have been it. Not that Ruth doesn’t have a right to the pain that she feels as the dark events pile up, but Nathan refuses to allow himself to succumb to despair.

Which is the real source of tension between Frank’s parents. Ruth doesn’t understand her husband—not what he values, nor what those things are worth to him.

Meanwhile, young Frank is watching and trying to figure his father out, and the reader is doing the same. The drunk man that Nathan rescues from jail is no stranger, but Nathan’s good friend and war buddy Gus. Throughout the story Gus alludes to the horrors they saw in the war. Though never revealed, it’s clearly the reason for Nathan’s change of heart and his change in his life’s direction and purpose.

And it seems that since the war, he’s drawn his inner strength from God.

Nathan isn’t just friends with Gus. He provides the man with housing in the church basement. It’s clear from Gus’s actions that he’s a good man, but struggles in life without a place. If the community is bothered by the support he gets from a man of the cloth, Nathan doesn’t seem to care. We’ve all heard of the once popular acronym “WWJD”? Instead, Nathan-the-preacher seems to live by the acronym “WDTSOTMS”—what does the Sermon on the Mount say? Because Nathan’s actions seem driven by the teachings of his Savior. Nathan’s support for Gus during his struggles pay off, and by the end of the story Gus gets his life on track and eventually builds a future for himself.

Which is what Krueger illuminates so carefully. Nathan isn’t a man of action, but of patience. As the deaths in town pile up, there are many who are quick to rush into irrational acts. While it’s important to solve the murders and bring the killers to justice, the community seems collectively to be ready to accuse an unhoused man based solely on prejudice, knowing he will never make it to a courtroom if caught.

Meanwhile, it’s young Frank who helps save the man’s life. He’s not even sure why he does so, but the reader knows he’s learning from Nathan the strength that patience requires.

The Resolution

Which the power of Krueger’s coming-of-age narrative. As the truth is revealed, the wealthy Brandt family is destroyed. The Drum family should meet a similar fate, simply for their entanglements with the Brandts. While the Drums can’t escape tragedy, they do survive it, and Frank and his brother build successful lives for themselves.

Ruth is reconciled to her husband. Frank sees the relationship between his parents transformed. He also learns that life is a long game, and quick anger is never the answer.

Krueger brings his whole point full circle in the epilogue. It’s decades later and Frank, Jake, and their father go to New Bremen. Nearly everyone from the story is now in the cemetery—the same one the “itinerant” was given a dignified burial by Frank’s father. All of the conflicts and strife from the past have landed everyone in the same place. Even Ruth is buried there after an early battle with cancer. The three men care for the graves of the people they once knew.

People who are likely only remembered by a few. It’s clear that Frank and his brother have built successful lives for themselves, despite the pain of that summer. And it’s evident that Nathan has been steady guide in their lives all these years.