We see him as a five-year-old on a family vacation, terrified of his abusive, domineering father. The present-day narrative of Ostlund’s book follows Aaron as he tentatively establishes a new life, teaching his classes, returning each day to the small apartment he rents in a couple’s converted garage.īut the bulk of the novel is given to Aaron’s past. “This is why I must leave.”Īnd so he packs up a U-Haul and drives to San Francisco, where he takes a job teaching English as a second language. “He saved me knowing that there is no stronger way to bind another human being to you than by saving him,” Aaron writes in a notebook he uses to list grievances against Walter. But it’s precisely this “Pygmalion aspect of their relationship” that Aaron has come to resent. A college professor, Walter gave Aaron “a different brain,” allowing him to exercise the intelligence that might otherwise have been stultified. “He saved my life,” Aaron says of Walter, who offered him a way out of his small Minnesota town and paid for his education. Aaron walks his neighborhood every day, feeding stray cats he and Walter read poetry to each other in the evenings. Repeatedly he tells us that “Walter was a good man who cared about others,” and nothing in their life together seems, on the face of it, particularly dire. Forty-one, for more than twenty years he has been in a relationship with Walter, fifteen years his senior. At the beginning of Lori Ostlund’s lyrical, intricately constructed first novel, Aaron Englund knows he has to escape his life.
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