For the last few months, I have been trying to finish writing the Jasper Hatchworth novel. I am close, but life, work, and the holidays are tugging against my time. The good news is that I am on the last two chapters, so I should be finished soon. This has come at the cost of doing my book reviews. Just about the only reading I have kept up with has been my book club reading. I did not plan to write critiques about October’s and November’s books. I feel wrong critiquing a memoir, and there are a few authors I like to turn my writer brain off and just indulge. December’s pick is The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah. This is one of my wife’s favorite authors. Does it stand up to my standards, or am I going to be sleeping on the couch tonight?
Summary
The Great Alone is a tragic tale about domestic abuse and a young woman trying to find herself in the Alaskan wilderness. After returning from the Vietnam War, Leni’s father is changed in ways that make it difficult for him to hold a job. Her father receives a letter from the father of one of his old platoon mates offering him the homestead of his deceased son. This is a chance to escape the crumbling world her father sees happening in the lower 48. Her father drags Leni and her mother to Alaska. Wildly unprepared, her family has to lean on the members of a small Alaskan community for support.
As the winter takes its toll on the mental health of her father, Leni sees the domestic abuse her mother suffers in vivid detail. Where walls separated the abuse before, the one-room homesteading cabin hides nothing from the young Leni. After a particularly brutal incident where her father’s actions become obvious to the neighboring homesteaders, Leni’s father is forced to leave the community during the winter to work on the oil pipelines.
Years later, after her father has lost his job once more, the family suffers under his instability during the winter yet again. This time Leni is intimately involved with Mathew, a young boy from a family Leni’s father despises. When Mathew and Leni get too careless, Mathew feels the need to protect Leni from her father and take her away from his abusive fists. After they try to return, Leni falls into a crevice and Mathew attempts to save her but falls into it himself becoming much more severely injured than Leni. He is placed into a coma to save his life. It doesn’t seem to Leni that Mathew will ever get better. Moreover, Leni finds out she is pregnant with Mathew’s child.
When Leni’s father finds out about the pregnancy, Leni’s mother makes a choice that will upend the lives of the entire family.
Scoring
Character – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The primary thing I need from a book’s characters is motivation. This is something many writers struggle to provide. I don’t think that is the case here. I like a lot of the characters. They are distinct. That is always great to see. The characters’ motivations are clear. I believe that their choices lead to consequences and thus they make more choices. They are in control of their story (more or less); they have agency. These characters are more conventional in terms of social constructs. Are they stereotypes? Possibly. One dimensional? I’m not as convinced of this claim as some of the people who have left negative reviews elsewhere on the internet. Let me explain why.
Complex characters are interesting characters. This is conventional wisdom and interesting characters can help propel a story along. A character with duel (and possibly conflicting) motivations creates a sense of internal conflict that must be resolved. Does a character try to make the sale and earn big bucks, or does the character go to her kid’s dance recital? She can want both things, but she has to pick one. Conflict is interesting, and complex characters often have lots of internal conflict.
But can a character be complex without conflicting motivations? Can a character want to leave an abusive relationship so they don’t get physically hurt anymore, and also want to leave an abusive relationship to pursue a job they have always dreamed of but couldn’t while entangled with the abuser?
Perhaps complex doesn’t just mean internal conflict. Maybe there is something more. I think of that something more as layering. A layered character has multiple motivations driving them to seek out a goal. The effect of having layered characters is that the stakes for each character become higher because they have multiple motivations for the same action. Multiple motivations that drive a character toward a goal mean failure to achieve it hurts more. The loss due to failure is more intense. Thus, I want layered characters in fiction as well as conflicted characters.
The characters that can engage us the most are complex and layered. Characters that express motivations we have seen before may feel like stereotypes if there isn’t enough complexity and layering within their motivations. So why do so many people find the characters in The Great Alone to be stereotypes? It could be due to a lack of complexity. I don’t necessarily see them as stereotypes. At least not the four main characters driving most of the plot.
If you weighed the characters on the scale of layered vs. complex, many of them may come out skewed toward the layered side, thus the views expressed claiming the characters are stereotypes. They want things that are traditional and they have layered motivations for seeking them, but they may be less conflicted than other characters within the sphere of literature. I’m not necessarily opposed to layered characters that want traditional things; I liked the characters in this book quite a bit because I felt like many of them were people I know or can relate to. To truly be a stereotype though I think you have to lack both a sense of layeredness and complexity. The support characters may fall into this, but I don’t think our main characters do.
Setting – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Kristin Hannah is very skilled when providing the setting for this novel. Everything is vivid without requiring paragraphs to achieve that picture. She knows what to describe about the setting and how to describe those things with clarity and concision. I have been to Alaska, and this felt spot on.
Plot – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Given the type of story being told, I easily predicted some of the events. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the plot though. The events followed from character motivations. I’m always game for a good sense of justice served, and I got that here.
The part of the plot that bothers me is the accident with Leni and Mathew. I think I understand why Kristin put this in. We get this act of environmental attack at the same time Mathew and Leni are physically fighting her father. Alaska is a metaphor for Leni’s father. We see this in how her father mirrors the environment by being more abusive in the winter and less in the summer. We see it when the physical attacks are coming from both her father and Alaska. And we see it when Leni finds happiness in activities with her father that are uniquely Alaskan.
I don’t like the Mathew accident part of the story one bit. It comes across as pushing too hard for an emotional resolution at the end. I can’t say I didn’t like the reunion between Leni and Mathew (I did cry quite a bit because I understood that so well) but the whole accident felt like too much emotional grabbing. Some people have said that the book could have been shorter by about a hundred pages, and if the accident hadn’t happened I agree it would have been about that much shorter. That also would have changed the tone and flavor. I wish I could be more precise with why I don’t like it, but I haven’t been able to find a satisfactory answer to why I would rather it not be in the book. I just don’t want it there.
Form – ⭐⭐
This book starts with a sizable chunk of limited third-person perspective focused on Leni. This was the case for so long that when we finally got a Mathew chapter I had to do a double-take. I expected that the entire novel was going to be in Leni’s third-limited POV, and here I am around the middle of the novel and suddenly I get a different character. It isn’t that you can’t introduce another perspective later in the novel, always go with what works to tell the best story, but I had expectations that were not met and that is not ideal. We didn’t have to necessarily get Mathew’s POV early in the novel, but we could have gotten someone other than Leni to set the pattern that other POVs might pop in once in a while. This is best done early in the book so the reader is not jarred by this later on. Other than this, the form was very conventional and well done.
Quality – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The writing is clean. She knows how to use various writing techniques quite well. I can see why she is so popular, and I think she has earned that popularity.
Enjoyment – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐x 2
The issues I have are minimal compared to my enjoyment of this book. I love sad books that push the reader to follow characters who live hard lives. Enjoying reading is like pairing a wine with a meal. You have to be the right person at the right phase of your life to feel the greatest impact of the work. This was the right moment for me to read this, and I couldn’t be happier.
Conclusion & Video
The composite score of 30 stars puts The Greate Alone in the Good Book category. The story was great and worked on many levels. It is well worth reading if you like stories set in Alaska about people overcoming domestic abuse.
Not this time Voidy.
Oh! Is that a guest I see in the video? Let’s find out.
