Her collection of stories, Catapult, was chosen by Ben Marcus for the Mary McCarthy Prize and will be published by Sarabande Books next year. The author grew up in Minnesota and has a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. the buds were still hard as arrow tips on the trees.”
The two main plots in Wolves show different sides of a young woman who is out to push boundaries, especially when it comes to power.įridlund’s writing is vibrant and exacting, from describing Paul’s world – “He’s four, he’s got an owl puzzle to do, don’t talk to him” – to the wild natural landscape that surrounds her characters: “The room felt poured in sunlight. Fridlund's Linda seems more in control of her choices than Cline's naive and impressionable teenager. The narrator of Emma Cline's The Girls finds herself in a similar situation, looking back, as Linda does, years later on her own part in an appalling situation. It was so hard to care – if anyone ever cared to begin with."īut Linda does care, and it is her tendency to over-involve herself in other people's lives that makes her complicit in tragedy by the book's end. Everyone had that underwater look in their eyes, especially teachers. Come summer, they've tuned out: "May was such a dissociative time. In the freezing winter climate, students watch each other, "clicking their mechanical pencils until the lead protruded obscenely, like hospital needles". In these brief sections, there are echoes of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, though the landscape in Wolves is far from privileged. With a self-possession and command of language that is unnerving in a teenager, Linda stalks about the school, carefully observing other outsiders: “Lily had big brown eyes, dyslexia, no pencil, a boyfriend.” She scorns her fellow classmates, collectively deeming them “the Karens, girls despising themselves in mirrors – scratching”. Known as “Freak” at her high school, Linda is a loner whose astute observations show a mind more adult than child. Teenager Linda Furston lives with her parents on an old commune in rural Minnesota, the last inhabitants, geographically and socially isolated. "What's the difference between what you think and what you end up doing?" Complex questions around culpability are the crux of Emily Fridlund's debut novel History of Wolves, a compelling story that is shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Award.
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