By William Kent Krueger
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
Many things I have wished I could be in this one life and a novelist is one of them. In truth, I have three such manuscripts somewhere in the stuff I have carried from Kentucky to Georgia. I became a minister instead and not one day have regretted that calling and career.
But in those three sentences I have given you two reasons I like the book I have just finished. It is a novel about a minister. It is not a newly published book, but one I picked up from the home of my sister. She loaned it only after writing her name in big bold letters inside the front cover and extracting a promise that I will return it when finished. Which I will do, of course. Which means I cannot loan it to you even as I encourage you to read it.
It is called Ordinary Grace; it was written by William Kent Krueger and published seven years ago.
It all takes place in Methodist churches in Minnesota in the year 1961. It is the story of the minister’s family, told in the voice of his oldest son, perhaps 14 years old (but frankly, I don’t remember if the narrative ever states his age). The father is Nathan Drum and his son is Frank, his daughter is Ariel, and the youngest child is Jake. The wife Ruth also plays a central role in this narrative of ministry and music, love and faith, intrigue and anger, and death and danger.
There are more deaths than I care to enumerate, and to do so would deprive you, the reader, of wonderful suspense. I will only say that I suspected the truth of this mystery halfway or more through the book but found it confirmed only in the last chapter and the one epilogue.
Truth be told, the epilogue may be the best part of the book, largely because it contains a few choice words about history and its interpretation. “…I know from my studies and from my life” writes Frank, forty years after the events” … that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed…. Whenever we talk about [that summer of 1961] I’m aware that Jake and my father recall things I don’t and what we remember together we often remember differently. I’m sure that each of us has memories that for reasons our own we don’t share. Some things we prefer remain lost in the shadows of our past.”
It is a wonderful story, and from the vantage point of a minister, I can say that it all rings so true: all of it—the good, the bad, the ugly, even the miraculous. There is, really, only one miracle in the book, and it is a prayer, from which the title of the book is taken. “For God’s sake, Nathan,” somebody says during the funeral, “can’t you, just this once, offer an ordinary grace?” Which he could not do but somebody else does, and that was the miracle, redeeming both the public ritual of the dead and the entire, emerging life of the person who prayed. Reading the whole book is worth the power and poignancy of that one scene, that one amazing, miraculous, prayerful scene. It is clear why Krueger choose a phrase from that scene for the title of the book.
The mix of ministry and murder is nothing new for the mystery genre, as both British and American authors have discovered. It is indeed the culture that frames my meager attempts at novelizing. In my case, the minister calls upon an old friend, the detective Jack Braden, to solve mysteries (but not necessarily crimes) that arise during the course of ministerial duties. I gave my first try the title Palm Beach, largely because I am familiar with The Breakers, the up-scale hotel in that famous city that features a front lawn full of an English-style croquet court. Coming soon to a bookstore near you.
But I promise you my book won’t be nearly as good as this Minnesota version of the ministry and mystery novel called Ordinary Grace. It is not up to the Western Canon, of course, but it is extraordinary enough for me to recommend it to you. And, when you read it, you will testify the same, using some version of words familiar to me—Amen!!
(August 2020)
