Brooding Upon the Waters

Before you get all priggish and tell me that I've got no business reviewing a book by a Dordt prof named Schaap, let me explain. It's not mine. Friend and former colleague in arms, Howard Schaap (no relation) has published (it's taken some painful time) his father/son story, not as fiction but memoir--including names and dates and places. He's titled it Brooding Upon the Waters, maybe a bit pretentious, but just about perfectly fitting for what's inside the covers, a life lived in the shadow of his father's bi-polar world. Brooding is a beautiful book, but it's not at all pretty.

It's beauty arises from its almost perfectly arranged weave of significant tropes; first, the trials of father Milt's mental/emotional illness, which serves as the  major track of the novel--Milt's manic ups and downs. Second, Howard's own highly developed sense of place (it's set here in Siouxland, in southwest Minnesota) and the identity this particular landscape bestows on those who live  here, whether they like it or not. Amazingly but convincingly, Laura Ingalls Wilder has a kind of starring role, although it's more accurate to say her father does. As charming and wonderful as the rest of the family were, the old man is and was a stinker the TV show chose not to feature. 

A third strand is drawn from Milt's Dutch Reformed pedigree, his faith, no matter what he thought of it or where it took him, and its practice. Fascinatingly, Howard traces his own Schaap genes back to the very heart of the afscheiden, the breakaway naysayer churches around Ulrum, the Netherlands took almost 200 years ago, a break engineered and celebrated by the loyal followers of what became, to many, a sect. That separatist undertaken created a legacy then shaped by the American experience of life on the unyielding land around the Leota, Minnesota. Milt is himself a victim of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, when things went under for him, making him feel himself to be a loser.

There's  more, I'm sure, but these are most of the majors with the exception of fishing, which becomes, in his son's retelling, the saving grace of his childhood and his father. Let me just say I've always been a fisherman wannabe, never really did much serious fishing, so all the technicalities Howard musters sort of miss me. What doesn't miss me, however, is the joy (and relief) that fishing brings to father and son. I don't think  you have to love fishing to love the book because Howard the Writer handles those scenes with such attention that the attention itself is convincing and compelling. Oh, yes, there's the totemic walleye glory that attends every day in the boat or on shore. Father and son are ever vigilant about the lord of the lakes, the walleye. They don't bite easily, but when they're landed, they're sacramental.

Most of the memoire features Milt's prolonged and painful stay at Mayo where the hospitals' legendary staff try their best to deal with a tough, tough patient and never quite do. That stay is a unifier, but it has its own powerful drama.

Every once in a while, you have to remind yourself that this is a memoire and not a novel because the story is told in such a seemingly imagined fashion. Milt Schaap is (or was) a real human being. His daughters are Howard's sisters; his wife is Howard's mom. There are moments in the story when you can only imagine being a fly on the wall listening his sisters reactions to what he's committed to the pages of this story. 

It's a really wonder-filled read that you want to--and some readers will--put down in places, not because it's boring (Howard's abilities as a writer are ever-evident), but because you just don't want to read what's almost inevitably coming.

Howard Schaap's Brooding Upon the Waters is really, really something. You won't put it down, even though you'll want to. Like I say, it's perfectly beautiful, but not at all pretty.