The Expeditions A Novel

by IAGNEMMA, KARL

• ISBN13: 9780385335966
• ISBN10: 0385335962
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-24
• Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback

Summary

From Karl Iagnemma, recipient of theParis ReviewPlimpton Prize, comes this fierce and gorgeous novel, the story of an estranged father and son's unlikely wanderings through the Upper Peninsula of nineteenth-century Michigan. The year is 1844. Sixteen-year-old runaway Elisha Stone has turned up in Detroit, a hardscrabble frontier town on the edge of the civilized world. Lighting out on a surveying expedition for the vast unknown wilderness of the northern peninsula, Elisha pens a heartfelt letter to his mother in Newell, Massachusetts. But it is Elisha's estranged father, the Reverend William Edward Stone, who opens the envelope. Grief-stricken by the recent death of his wifea death Elisha could not have known aboutReverend Stone is jolted into action. He must find his son. What follows is a powerful narrative about the complex love between fathers and sons and an evocative portrait of an era of faith, wonder, and violence. A first novel of uncommon wisdom,The Expeditionsis the confirmation of an extraordinary talent.

Author Biography

Karl Iagnemma’s work has won the Paris Review Plimpton Prize and been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. He is a research scientist in the mechanical engineering department at M.I.T. His collection, On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, is available from Dial Press Trade Paperbacks.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

Chapter One


The appointment was at ten o’clock on Lafayette Street, on the city’s west side, and Elisha stepped from his boardinghouse at six that morning into a gauzy gray mist. Draft horses slapped down the muddy street, hauling drays loaded with potatoes and cabbages. He strolled down the sidewalk to Jefferson Avenue, drank a mug of milk as he listened to a newsboy call out the morning’s headlines: White woman elopes with Negro servant to Windsor! Settlers burned alive in Shelby by savage Chippewas! He felt a familiar nervous chill at the city’s rush and clamor. The air smelled sweetly foul, like burning trash.

He walked down Jefferson to Woodward Avenue then up to the Military Square, where a group of men were unloading red lacquered trunks from a caravan of weather-worn buggies. A handbill tacked to a message board at the square’s entrance read:

traveling exhibition of fabulous beasts l. gasperi—animal trainer extraordinaire see camels from arabia—elephants from siam— llamas from the bolivian mountains admission fee: one dime

As Elisha watched, one of the men unlatched the door of a high-sided wagon and led a frail, shaggy camel by a rope knotted around its neck. The animal stepped gingerly, twisting its long neck to gaze at its surroundings. Elisha drew a notebook from his vest pocket and licked a stub of pencil, sketched the animal’s head and oddly humped back. The camel’s handler glanced over his shoulder and called, “Hey boyo, no free looks! Come back tonight, you want to see!”

Elisha started up Michigan Avenue into the Irish quarter and its cramped, hustling streets. At Sixth Street a group of women were singing choral tunes around a donation basket. He paused to watch them: two skinny, black-haired sopranos and a squat, sleepy-looking alto. The boy was sixteen years old and his thoughts were almost entirely of women: their hair, their powder smells, their fleeting glances on the sidewalk. Young women in shop windows and ladies in broughams and girls strolling arm in arm down the avenue. The alto cut her gaze to Elisha and he ducked away.

He hurried down Sixth Street toward the river, quickening his pace as he emerged at the wharf. He continued southward past a row of shanties until he came to a stagnant stretch of sedge and driftwood. Elisha pulled off his shoes and sat on a stone at the river’s edge, careful not to muddy his trousers. He leaned forward and rested his chin on his knees. From his position he could barely hear the hoofbeats on Woodbridge Avenue, but despite the quiet Elisha could not settle his nerves. Pond skaters tickled among the sedge, their passage visible as faint dimples in the river’s surface. A merganser coasted toward the boy then angled upriver. Elisha withdrew his notebook and sketched the scene, his thoughts slowing, the city’s noise fading to nothing. He worked long after the bell at St. Anne’s had tolled nine o’clock.

He rose feeling wonderfully calm. He started up Seventh until he reached Lafayette, then entered a shop with its window painted to read O. Chocron, Clothier. He purchased a five-cent collar from the frowning proprietor, then stood before a tall mirror and buttoned the collar beneath his chin, the stiff linen chafing his neck. His own figure in the glass annoyed him: the cowlicked hair, the high, pale forehead, the pockmarked cheeks without even a hint of beard. A frightened boy in a man’s clothes, certainly not a fellow to be reckoned with, certainly not one to be entrusted with an important task.

He exhaled deeply and attempted a fierce smile, and for a moment the boy in the mirror disappeared.

Thirty-one Lafayette Street was a two-story mansion with broad double doors and a columned porch, an orange-tiled roof topped by a cupola. Elisha stood at the street’s edge for some time. He had e

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Excerpted from The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma
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