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Beautiful, icy 'history of wolves' transcends genre.

Michael Schaub

History of Wolves

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There's a reason that some readers view contemporary coming-of-age novels with suspicion. Too many play out the same way: An odd but winsome young person goes on some kind of journey of discovery, either literal or figurative, and learns something about himself or herself in the process. Often, there's an awkward romance. And the ending, whether happy or otherwise, can usually be described as bittersweet.

There are exceptions, of course, and Emily Fridlund's electrifying debut novel History of Wolves is one of them. The book doesn't follow the now-familiar narrative arc that other novels in the genre do. There's no moment of revelation at the end; if anything, the protagonist ends up more confused than she was at the beginning. Fridlund refuses to obey the conventions that her sometimes hidebound colleagues do, and her novel is so much the better for it.

History of Wolves follows a 14-year-old girl named Madeline, though nobody calls her that: "At school, I was called Linda, or Commie, or Freak." The unkind nicknames are the result of her upbringing on a northern Minnesota commune, long since abandoned by all of its idealistic residents, with the exception of her parents. To them, Linda is something of an enigma, overly serious, lacking the heedless playfulness of other children. "[My mother] wanted very badly for me to cavort and pretend, to prove I was unharmed, happy," Linda muses, but she finds herself unable to participate in the ruse.

Linda's year is changed by the arrival of a new history teacher, Mr. Grierson, the kind of adult desperate to be seen as cool by his adolescent charges. Linda makes a passing attempt to seduce him; later, he's arrested and accused of possessing child pornography and having sex with one of his students.

When a new family moves across the lake from the mostly abandoned commune, Linda sees a chance to distract herself from her unhappy home and school life. She develops a quick affection for Patra, a young woman who works editing her astronomer husband's manuscripts, and their four-year-old boy, Paul. The couple hires Linda to babysit Paul during the summer days.

Linda doesn't know quite what to make of Paul, or of children in general. "By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks," she thinks. "They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that's what you wanted — pretenders who didn't know they were pretending at all."

Patra, Paul and Linda grow close, although Linda harbors misgivings about Leo, the quiet and mysterious father of the boy. It doesn't take long for Linda's doubts to be confirmed, when something terrible happens — it's out of the blue, and it leaves both Linda and the reader in shock.

History of Wolves isn't a typical thriller any more than it's a typical coming-of-age novel; Fridlund does a remarkable job transcending genres without sacrificing the suspense that builds steadily in the book. She's particularly effective using descriptions of nature to provide eerie foreshadowing: "You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. ... The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters."

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment in the novel is Fridlund's portrayal of Linda, who the reader encounters not just as a teenager, but, in brief flash-forward scenes, as an adult still psychically wounded from the events of the summer. Sometimes people overcome the traumas they were subjected to as children; sometimes they don't. For most people, and for Linda, it's somewhere in between.

"Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things," an adult Linda reflects. "But isn't that the crux of the problem? Wouldn't we all act differently if we were someone else?"

Looking in hindsight isn't any more accurate than trying to predict the future, of course; and neither really works out for Linda. But she's such an incredible character — both typical and special, sometimes capable of great love and sometimes spectacularly not — that it's hard to turn away from her sometimes horrifying story. History of Wolves is as beautiful and as icy as the Minnesota woods where it's set, and with her first book, Fridlund has already proven herself to be a singular talent.

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HISTORY OF WOLVES

by Emily Fridlund ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2017

Four years after its initial prize, this slender work is worth the wait.

An atmospheric, near-gothic coming-of-age novel turns on the dance between predator and prey.

Fridlund’s debut won the McGinnis-Ritchie Award in 2013 for its first chapter. It’s a 17-page stunner that begins with a child ghost and ends in a chorus of communal condemnation. The novel itself unfurls in far northern Minnesota, where a 14-year-old named Mattie Furston, who calls herself Linda, is living on a failed commune with her parents. She's hungry in flesh and spirit, a backwoods outcast among “hockey players in their yellowed caps...cheerleaders with their static-charged bangs.” She chops wood and cleans fish with her father, who was “kind to objects. With people he was a little afraid.” When a young woman moves with her 4-year-old son into a new cabin across the lake, the teenage Linda, who's looking back on these events as an adult, is hired to babysit. Fridlund is an assured writer: she knows how water tuts against a boat hull and how mosquitoes descend into any patch of shade. Her sense of cold freezes the reader: “Beneath a foot of ice, beneath my boots, the walleye drifted. They did not try to swim, or do anything that required effort. They hovered, waiting winter out with driftwood, barely beating their hearts.” As dread coils around Linda, the novel gives up its secrets slowly. One concerns an eighth-grade teacher accused of owning child porn; another is tangled in the newcomer family’s Christian Science. Fridlund circles these threads around each other in tightening, mesmerizing loops. The novel has a tinge of fairy tale, wavering on the blur between good and evil, thought and action. But the sharp consequences for its characters make it singe and sing—a literary tour de force.

Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2587-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION

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by Emily Fridlund

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

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HISTORY OF WOLVES By Emily Fridlund 279 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $25.

Linda, The protagonist of Emily Fridlund’s debut novel, hails from Minnesota’s north woods and says little. If you have spent any amount of time in this part of the country, this reticence should be familiar. It is as if a code of silence blankets the land, much like subfreezing temperatures do for many months of the year. As Linda remarks upon venturing outdoors one afternoon, “My face changed into something other than face, got rubbed out.” The cold is indifferent to human comfort and so too, Linda suspects, are most humans — at least to the comfort of others.

Linda’s earliest years were spent on a commune where child-rearing duties were shared by all adults; at one point she wonders whether her low-energy parents, who meander along the perimeter of the action, never mattering much, are really hers. When a teacher taps a teenage Linda to represent her high school at History Odyssey, she selects wolves as her topic. She is unfazed by the judge’s verdict that her report on wolves falls into the category of natural history and so misses the point.

The rules of fiction dictate that trouble will start once Linda’s attention turns toward people. The first development is the rumor that the aforementioned teacher likes some of his students too much. Then a couple with a young child move into a newly built house across the lake. They are from the ranks of citified “summer people,” and Linda observes their halting gestures to inhabit the north with a blend of fascination and scorn. Their relative wealth will not compensate for their inexperience, that is obvious.

It is not giving away too much to reveal that after ratcheting up the tension, Fridlund does not take readers to the sunless place many might guess — a warren of child pornographers deep in the woods, an inconvenient hole in the ice. That I was relieved at the slow-motion tragedy that does unfold is testimony to Fridlund’s daring. An artful story of sexual awakening and identity formation turns more stomach-churning; child sacrifice takes many forms, and sometimes the act doesn’t require bloodshed but simply adults too wedded to their ideals.

As the plot pivots toward Linda’s growing attachment to the family across the lake, character becomes destiny. The young wife, Patra, has an elfin quality that belies an essential passivity. That the professor husband is named Leo is something of a joke. The only thing leonine about him is the power he wields languorously over his family; he is horrendously ill-equipped to steward the deference shown him. When Linda is hired to babysit for their 4-year-old, she exhibits the impatience one feels only for a creature more or less one’s peer — or a competitor for affection. It is unclear, even to Linda herself, which familial role she is playing understudy for.

Few images in contemporary fiction have struck me as forcefully as that of Patra bent over in the driveway in anguish, mouth cracked open in a Munch-like silent scream. Fridlund has a tendency to double up on her descriptors, to use two adjectives where one would do. But she is masterly when she lets more scraped-down prose push a series of elemental questions to the fore: Do intentions matter? What price will you pay to feel wanted? How does it feel to ​be both guilty and exonerated? The result is a novel of ideas that reads like smart pulp, a page-turner of craft and calibration.

Megan Hustad is the author of “More Than Conquerors: A Memoir of Lost Arguments.”

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BookBrowse Reviews History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

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History of Wolves

by Emily Fridlund

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This debut novel about innocence and complicity in negligence raises uncomfortable questions about morality.

History of Wolves ' narrator, fourteen-year-old Madeline Furston, is adrift in Loose River Minnesota, the "Walleye Capital of the World." She lives in a lakeside cabin with her parents, the sole remaining members of a former commune. Madeline is a lonely girl who feels a kinship with wolves, recognizing something feral within herself that is desperate for expression. Her parents are distant and odd, providing little in the way of authority or guidance. When there are rumors at school that the new history teacher is a pedophile, she throws herself at him, desperate to be wanted. When the Gardner family moves into the cabin across the lake, she becomes transfixed by the glimmer of normalcy that has always been out of her reach. The Gardners include Leo, a college professor; Patra, his doting wife; and their precocious four-year-old son Paul. Patra hires Madeline as a regular babysitter for Paul and the arrangement is idyllic at first. Madeline is enamored with Patra and fond of Paul, and desperate to tether herself to the bulwark of this traditional nuclear family, but she gradually realizes that something is very wrong. Paul is often ill, and exactly what it is that plagues him (and why) becomes clear as the plot progresses. Patra is a fascinating character as well, though we must puzzle out her thoughts and motivations from Madeline's perspective. Madeline is alternatively attracted to, and repelled by her. Madeline narrates the story from the future, as an adult, and weaves in details about her later life. It isn't a pretty picture. She has trouble staying in one place, holding down a job, and forming serious attachments with people. It's unclear how fully the young Madeline grasped what was actually happening, and she was certainly bullied by the adults into passivity, but she still struggles with guilt over not adequately helping Paul. From this perspective, Fridlund shows how an action—or in this case inaction—can reverberate through a person's entire life, sowing damage and discord. Madeline's formative years were all too formative. Fridlund builds tension and dread skillfully with meditative, slow-churning prose. She describes the walleye hibernating under the frozen lake, "barely beating their hearts," the lake itself ever threatening to fracture and break. When the weather turns warm, the heat is "oppressive" and there are forest fires. Madeline's ennui is predatory: "the whole day seemed to bare its open jaws at me," she recalls. While her circumstances give her reason to feel particularly isolated, Madeline is also an archetype of adolescent alienation. Fridlund portrays this feeling accurately, in all its absurdity: "I thought if I slammed the door hard enough, Mr Grierson might come after me. That's what it's like to be fourteen." This is a compelling and unconventional narrative where we are asked to examine degrees of guilt and complicity. History of Wolves is also unique because the main character is on the periphery of someone else's story, yet no less impacted. Fridlund's only flaw is that she articulates these themes a little more explicitly than necessary, either not trusting the reader to make their own connections, or not trusting that she did her job well enough. If it's the latter, she needn't have worried.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, history of wolves.

Linda, the narrator and central figure of Emily Fridlund’s haunting debut novel, is one of the loneliest literary characters in recent memory. As a socially and physically isolated young teenager, she is an observer, at times a voyeur, who craves attention and connection, though she fears it as well. She is a ghost-like presence in HISTORY OF WOLVES, stalking the woods and lakeshore of her small Minnesota town, quietly walking the halls of her high school, unsure of her own origins and feelings. Even her name is ephemeral and slippery: She is Madeline but called Mattie by some and Linda by others. At the beginning of the story, she is interested in the relationship between a strange and lovely girl named Lily and a new teacher, Mr. Grierson. But soon she is caught up in another dangerous circumstance when a family with a small son moves in across the lake from her own home.

"Fridlund’s writing is fluid and at times arresting as she challenges the naive Linda to deal with situations bigger and more complex than any 14-year-old should face.... This is a smart, tense and very sad novel, lovely to read but also heart-wrenching."

While the rumors about Lily and Mr. Grierson begin to swirl, he asks Linda to be the school representative in History Odyssey. Instead of selecting a traditional history project, Linda chooses to research the history of wolves. This decision is typical of Linda: off-kilter, misjudged and confounding, coming from a place of both innocence and dissent. Her interest in Lily remains strong in the background of the novel, even as the adult Linda navigates work, relationships, memory and her complicated feelings for her parents.

However, with the arrival of the Gardner family --- husband Leo, wife Patra and four-year-old son Paul --- the novel and Linda’s perspective shift and tilt in new directions. With Leo away for work, Patra and Paul are lonely and unprepared for the long rural Minnesota winter. Linda starts work babysitting Paul, guiding him through the snowy and muddy woods. Her knowledge of the birds, animals and trees in the area is rich, created by her own family’s secluded backwoods lifestyle. Fridlund’s treatment of Linda’s connection to nature gives HISTORY OF WOLVES a fairytale-like tone --- lyrical and menacing at the same time. Linda proves to be a strong and at times imaginative caregiver for Paul, and perhaps the only companion Patra can count on. But Linda’s emotional longing and intellectual unsophistication mean that she ignores her instincts about the Gardners and thus is witness, and some say complicit, to a terrible and preventable tragedy.

HISTORY OF WOLVES, though short, tackles several potent themes --- from the constitution of family to the potential harm of religion, from the importance of being seen to the dangers of blind belief and dogmatism, and from sexual awakening to the meaning of home. Fridlund’s writing is fluid and at times arresting as she challenges the naive Linda to deal with situations bigger and more complex than any 14-year-old should face. Fridlund also does a good job creating an adult Linda who seems to grow realistically from the teenage one. Linda perhaps wants to embody the fierce aspects of the wolf, but in the end takes on their shadowy and even timid nature.

This is a smart, tense and very sad novel, lovely to read but also heart-wrenching.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on January 4, 2017

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

• Publication Date: January 3, 2017
• Genres: Fiction
• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• ISBN-10: 0802125875
• ISBN-13: 9780802125873

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Review: 'history of wolves,' by emily fridlund.

Deep in the heart of northern Minnesota, a 10th-grader named Linda lives an aimless and mostly solitary life with her parents in the ruins of a failed commune. She doesn't have many friends, and her only interests seem to be her dogs, fishing and rambling around the woods.

When a young family moves in across the lake, she finds herself babysitting the family's young boy, Paul. If their bond does not evolve into love, it certainly takes on the blush of a deep and curious friendship.

Over the course of a year, as their bond forms, Linda and Paul learn to coexist in a house most notable for its strangeness.

Paul's mother, Patra, and his father, Leo, are devout Christian Scientists, and while their lives appear normal at a glance, they're really only experts at their own privacy. What they hide from others becomes their great tragedy, and Linda has a front-row seat for all of it.

This novel asks some difficult questions, especially of Patra and Linda. Late in the book Linda wonders, "What's the difference between what you want to believe and what you do? … And what's the difference between what you think and what you end up doing?"

But the tragedy at the heart of this book is also complicated — taking as it does a family's right to live (or die) according to its own faith.

Because Patra's and Leo's faith is foreign to Linda, it remains mostly foreign to the reader as well, a fact that left me wishing the novel had investigated more directly Leo's hold on his kin.

The book also can't quite decide whether it's a literary novel or a thriller, and so in a sense fails at being either.

Couple this with a handful of egregious factual errors — Fridlund describes watching from a Canal Park hotel as Lake Superior waves drag stones out of a "cove," refers to Hwy. 61 as an "interstate" and watches the tall ships entering Duluth harbor at 40 miles per hour, to name a few — and the book demonstrates a less than authoritative view of northern Minnesota, especially Duluth.

All of which is unfortunate, as this novel has so much else to offer, not the least a tragedy of Shakespearean scope.

Minneapolis writer Peter Geye is the author of "Wintering," due out in paperback in May.

History of Wolves By: Emily Fridlund. Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 279 pages, $25. Events: 7 p.m. Jan. 10, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls.; 7 p.m. Jan. 12, Barnes & Noble, Galleria, Edina

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The Literary Edit

Review: History of Wolves – Emily Fridlund

The problem with having a book buying addiction is that, like many habits, it can be tough to overcome. Having been unable to work for almost a year (due to ongoing visa restrictions) has taught me many things – one of which is to live frugally. I scrimp and I save wherever possible – I walk rather than catching the bus, Ubers are – for the most part – a thing of the past, I buy seasonal fruit and veg; on the infrequent occasions I go out for dinner or drinks with friends, I google the menu of the venue we’ll be spending the night, and meticulously plan what I’ll be eating and drinking, according to the amount of money in my bank account. And yet, when it comes to books, I simply can’t help myself – if there’s money in my account it will be spent on books, even if it means a somewhat limited diet for the week ahead.

And so it was, that when I recently met up with my friend Hermione at my favourite bookshop in Sydney, Gertrude & Alice , that I left with $70 worth of books – one being History of Wolves – and thus followed our rendevouz with an hour’s walk home to Clovelly to avoid paying a paltry bus fare after my book splurge.

Intrigued by the book’s blurb, I started the novel that night, and was soon swept away by its sense of place and uneasy nature. History of Wolves is a coming of age story that is narrated by and follows the life of fourteen-year-old Linda, her infatuation with a school mate who allegedly had an affair with their professor, and later a family who move across the lake from where she lives with her parents. Linda, mostly left to raise herself by hippy, laid-back parents, lives in Northern Minnesota, on grounds that used to belong to a commune, of which her parents were members.

The tale is taut with tension and disquiet, and the wild Minnesota woods offer an eerie backdrop to Linda’s journey as she battles the fine lines between right and wrong and ignorance and innocence. Soon after befriending the family across the lake – Patra, Leo and their son Paul – it becomes apparent that the son is being mistreated, but Linda is hesitant in voicing her opinion for fear of being outcast by her new friends.

History of Wolves pivots between two times zones; Linda as a young and feral teen, and in later life, recollecting the sinister events that were so instrumental in her adolescence. The setting is a wintry one; which perhaps made it a slightly slower read as it was that I worked my way through it in the sweltering sun, but the tale is compelling, rife with complexities and a crisp narrative.

About Emily Fridlund

Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota and currently resides in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, Zyzzyva, Five Chapters, New Orleans Review, Sou’wester, New Delta Review, Chariton Review, The Portland Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Fridlund’s collection of stories,  Catapult , was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award for Fiction and the Tartts First Fiction Award. It won the Mary McCarthy Prize and will be published by Sarabande in 2017. The opening chapter of  History of Wolves  was published in Southwest Review and won the 2013 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction.

About History of Wolves

Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outlander at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong.

And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. It seems that her life finally has purpose but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do – and fail to do – for the people they love.

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History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund review – God and grooming

T he coming-of-age novel can be almost as painful as actually coming of age. It’s a genre that demands a tricky combination of narrative knowingness and character naivety, while recruiting the reader’s sympathies for one of God’s least sympathetic creations: the teenager. Even so, many novelists choose it for their debut, and last year offered two examples that exemplified both the successes and frustrations of the form. Emma Cline’s The Girls was a woozy hormonal fug that found the horror in the thrill of growing up; Tiffany McDaniels’ The Summer that Melted Everything smothered its story’s gothic potential in stentorian hindsight.

Emily Fridlund’s debut falls between the two. Teenage narrator Linda gets called “commie” and “freak” by her schoolmates, and it’s small wonder that she doesn’t fit in when her background has precision-tooled her for oddness. Raised by parents who are the last vestiges of a failed cult, she lives a semi-wilderness life in a cabin at the edge of a lake, on the fringe of a northern Minnesota forest. Uncomfortable in the world, she spreads discomfort about her: “I was flat-chested, plain as a bannister. I made people feel judged.”

Life offers her two simultaneous chances to fit in, although both – as we know from the start – go terribly wrong. Firstly, there’s Mr Grierson, a new teacher who encourages Linda to enter the “History Odyssey” inter-school competition. Linda gives a presentation on the history of wolves, from which the novel takes its name. There is no such thing as a true “alpha wolf”, she tells her audience (and the reader): instead, “an alpha animal may only be alpha at certain times for a specific reason”. Linda memorises those lines like “an amendment to the constitution”. What they teach her about power changes her life, and directs the story of the novel.

Secondly, there’s four-year-old Paul, who along with his mother Patra moves into the cabin across the water from Linda. Linda’s background means she’s only really seen how to be a kid from the outside: “I remembered children from the playground where I’d watched them when I was growing up. Plus, I’d read some books with children in them,” she says. Paul is her chance to belong to a real family, to learn to be normal. Unfortunately, Paul is not normal. His parents are deeply involved in Christian Science and Paul himself is, we learn on page four, doomed.

Mr Grierson is not much better off. His concern for his pupils is not limited to innocent encouragement, and his fall is flagged soon after his introduction. God and grooming, child death and grotty sex, blame and betrayal – this should be a recipe for morbid curiosity. But when everything is explicitly foreshadowed, nothing is at stake. Fridlund carries on meticulously dressing her traps long after they’ve been sprung. In some ways, this is the standard literary fiction shortcoming of thinking plot is the least important part. In others, Fridlund’s weaknesses are her own.

Characters tend to be vague outlines with tics. Leo tucks his shirt in a lot; Linda’s mother baptises her obsessively. But there are none of the subtle mechanisms that make characters coherent – and capable of acting surprisingly. There is only one mood: slow and sad. A good teenage novel needs some riot with its woe ( The Bell Jar , for example, is enormously funny, as well as being a book about suicide). Having given up the plot goods early, Fridlund’s hold on the reader slips too. For a novel that aspires to say something about about power, History of Wolves is strikingly impotent.

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History of Wolves (Fridlund)

History of Wolves   Emily Fridlund, 2017 Atlantic/Grove 288 pp. ISBN-13: 9780802125873 Summary Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outlander at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong. And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. It seems that her life finally has purpose but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do—and fail to do—for the people they love. Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, Emily Fridlund’s propulsive and gorgeously written History of Wolves introduces a new writer of enormous range and talent. ( From the publisher .)

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The Real ‘Deep State’

Lobbying firms have disguised their influence so well that it’s often barely visible even to savvy Washington insiders.

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O n March 18 , news broke that Donald Trump intended to restore the disgraced lobbyist Paul Manafort to the ranks of his campaign advisers. In any other moral universe, this would have been an unimaginable rehabilitation. Back in 2016, as revelations about Manafort’s work on behalf of pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine began appearing in the press, even Trump considered him a figure so toxic that he forced him to resign as chair of his campaign. Two years later, Manafort was locked up in federal prison on charges of tax evasion and money laundering, among other transgressions. His was one of the most precipitous falls in the history of Washington.

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But at this stage in that history, it’s not remotely shocking to learn that the revolving door continues to turn. By the end of Trump’s term, Manafort had already won a presidential pardon. His unwillingness to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had earned him Trump’s unstinting admiration: “Such respect for a brave man,” he tweeted. Now it seemed that Manafort’s loyalty would be rewarded with the lobbyist’s most valuable tool: the perception of access, at an opportune moment.

In early May, under growing media scrutiny for international consulting work that he’d reportedly been involved in after his pardon, Manafort said that he would “ stick to the sidelines ,” playing a less visible role in supporting Trump. (He’d recently been in Milwaukee, part of meetings about this summer’s Republican National Convention programming.) But if Trump wins the election, Manafort won’t need 2024 campaign work officially on his résumé to convince corporations and foreign regimes that he can bend U.S. policy on their behalf—­and he and his ilk will be able to follow through on such pledges with unimpeded ease. A second Trump term would mark the culmination of the story chronicled by the brothers Luke and Brody Mullins, a pair of energetic reporters, in their absorbing new book, The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government .

From the March 2018 issue: Franklin Foer on the origins of Paul Manafort

As Trump dreams about governing a second time, he and his inner circle have declared their intention to purge what they call the “deep state”: the civil service that they regard as one of the greatest obstacles to the realization of Trump’s agenda. What they don’t say is that the definition of the deep state—an entrenched force that wields power regardless of the administration in the White House—now fits the business of lobbying better than it does the faceless bureaucracy. This is the deep state, should Trump emerge the victor in the fall, that stands to achieve near-total domination of public power.

L obbying , like Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is a quintessentially American industry. The sector took root along the K Street corridor of gleaming glass-and-steel buildings in downtown D.C. during the 1970s. Though accurately capturing the scale of its growth is hard, a study by George Mason University’s Stephen S. Fuller Institute reported that, in 2016, the “advocacy cluster” employed more than 117,000 workers in metropolitan Washington (that’s more than the population of Manchester, New Hampshire). In theory, lobbying is a constitutionally protected form of redressing grievances. Businesses have every right to argue their case in front of government officials whose policies affect their industries. In practice, lobbying has become a pernicious force in national life, courtesy of corporate America, which hugely outspends other constituencies—­labor unions, consumer and environmental groups—­on an enterprise now dedicated to honing ever more sophisticated methods of shaping public opinion in service of its own ends.

The forerunners of the modern lobbyist were Tommy “The Cork” Corcoran, a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust, and Clark Clifford, who ran President Harry Truman’s poker games. Both men left jobs in government to become freelance fixers, working on behalf of corporate behemoths (the United Fruit Company, for example, and General Electric). Mystique was essential to their method. Corcoran kept his name out of the phone book and off his office door. If a company was bothered by a nettlesome bureaucrat—­­or wanted help overthrowing a hostile Central American government—they were the men ready to pick up the phone and make it so.

But Corcoran and Clifford were anomalous figures. In the late ’60s, only about 60 registered lobbyists were working in Washington. Most businesses, during the decades of postwar prosperity, didn’t see the point in hiring that sort of help. Management was at peace with labor. Corporations paid their taxes, while reaping ample profits. Then along came Ralph Nader, a young Harvard Law School graduate who ignited the modern consumer movement. By dint of his fervent advocacy, he managed to rally Congress to pass the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966, which led auto­makers to install headrests and shatter-resistant windshields. Nader, a scrappy upstart, single-handedly outmaneuvered the great General Motors.

From the October 1966 issue: Elizabeth Drew on the politics of automobile safety

Slow to register an emerging threat, corporate America sat complacently on the sidelines while an expansive new regulatory state emerged, posing a potential obstacle to business imperatives: The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, followed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration the next year, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972. Meanwhile, in 1971, a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, named Lewis Powell urged a counterrevolution , writing a memo that called on the corporate world to build the infrastructure that would cultivate pro-business intellectuals and amass political power to defend the free market. Later that year, Richard Nixon named him to the Supreme Court.

A figure from outside the conservative orbit became the ground commander of the corporate cause in the capital. Tommy Boggs was the son of the legendary Hale Boggs, a Democratic congressman from Louisiana. The Great Society was, in no small measure, Hale’s legislative handiwork, and Washington was in Tommy’s blood. (As a boy, he ran House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s private elevator in the Capitol.) He saw how he could become a successor to Corcoran and Clifford, but on a far grander scale. After a failed run for Congress in 1970, he devoted himself to expanding the lobbying firm Patton Boggs.

Boggs mobilized a grand corporate alliance (including television networks, advertising agencies, and food conglomerates) to roll back the liberal state—and then ferociously used his connections on his clients’ behalf. M&M’s and Milky Way (he was working for the Mars candy company) were among the beneficiaries of a major victory. Jimmy Carter’s Federal Trade Commission had threatened to regulate the advertising of candy and sugar-heavy cereals directed at kids. Boggs sent the deputy editor of The Washington Post ’s editorial page, Meg Greenfield, material about the horrors of this regulation. The newspaper then published an editorial with the memorable headline “ The FTC as National Nanny .” Senators thundered against the absurdity of the new vigilance. The FTC abandoned its plans.

Boggs ignited not just a revolution in American government, but a cultural transformation of Washington. Before his ascent, patricians with boarding-school pedigrees sat atop the city’s social hierarchy, disdainful of pecuniary interests and the ostentatious flaunting of wealth. Boggs, very highly paid to work his wonders, rubbed his success in Washington’s face. He would cruise around town in one of the firm’s fleet of luxury cars with a brick-size mobile phone plastered to his face, a cigar dangling from his mouth.

T he story that unfolds in The Wolves of K Street features an ironic twist: Liberal activists figured out how to mobilize the public to care about important issues and how to inspire them to become democratically engaged. K Street fixers saw this success, then adapted the tactics to serve the interests of corporations. In the Mullinses’ narrative, this evolution found its embodiment in Tony Podesta. An activist who came of age during the anti-war movement of the 1960s and a veteran of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, Podesta made his name running the TV producer Norman Lear’s group People for the American Way, a progressive counterweight to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. In 1987, Podesta helped rally the left to sink Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee.

Not long after, Podesta left the world of public-interest advocacy and began to sell his expertise—­at first primarily to liberal groups, then almost exclusively to businesses. Using the techniques he learned while working with Lear, he specialized in deploying celebrity figures to influence public attitudes, counting on citizen sentiment to in turn sway politicians. To block the FDA from regulating vitamins in 1993 (his client was a group of dietary-supplement manufacturers), he cut an ad with the actor Mel Gibson that depicted a SWAT team busting him at home for possessing vitamin C. “Call the U.S. Senate and tell them that you want to take your vitamins in peace,” Gibson said in a voice-over.

With stunning speed, Podesta—a bon vivant who went on to amass one of Washington’s most impressive private collections of contemporary art—had gone from excelling in impassioned advocacy to becoming promiscuous in his choice of client. To fund his lifestyle, the Mullinses write, he helped Lockheed Martin win approval of the sale of F-16s to Pakistan, even though the Indian government, another client of the Podesta Group, opposed the deal. He represented the tire manufacturer Michelin and its competitor Pirelli. Over the objections of his staff, he joined forces with Paul Manafort to polish the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt pro-Kremlin politician who ruled Ukraine until a revolution ousted him in 2014.

As K Street boomed, the Mullinses show, its denizens remade American life well beyond Washington culture. They report that the firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, also a central player in their book, aided the Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch in overcoming regulatory obstacles and extending his corrosive media empire in the United States. In the ’80s, the firm became masters at deregulating industries and securing tax breaks for the powerful—$130 million for Bethlehem Steel, $58 million for Chrysler, $38 million for Johnson & Johnson—helping to usher in an age of corporate impunity and gaping inequality.

T he Wolves of K Street is full of cautionary tales about the normalization of corruption. Revolving-door practices—leaving government jobs and parlaying insider connections into lucrative lobbying work—became part of the system. Meanwhile, the culture fueled fraudulent self-aggrandizing of the sort on lurid display in the sad case of a relatively fringe figure named Evan Morris. A kid from Queens who first arrived in town as a college intern in the Clinton White House, he quickly grasped that K Street represented the city’s best path to power and wealth. He scored a coveted job at Tommy Boggs’s firm while in law school, arriving just as lobbyists became essential cogs in a whole new realm: the machinery of electioneering.

The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002—campaign-finance legislation intended to wean the political system off big donors—prevented corporations and individuals from writing massive checks to political parties. Unable to rely as heavily on big donors, campaigns were happy to outsource to lobbyists the arduous job of rounding up smaller contributions from the wealthy: Lobbyists became “bundlers,” in fundraising parlance. As a 20-something, Morris proved to be one of the Democratic Party’s most exuberant solicitors, promising donors VIP access to events that he couldn’t provide, or intimating that he was asking on behalf of Boggs himself, which he wasn’t. Despite his relative inexperience, he managed to schmooze with the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

He went on to work for Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, and hatched a kind of campaign that he described as “black ops.” Amid the bird-flu outbreak of 2005, the Mullinses write, he began urging the government to stockpile the antiviral medication that Roche produced. He hired consultants to promote news stories that stoked public panic about the bird flu. He compiled studies touting the benefits of the drug, including some written by people who had at one point received money from Roche. The government bought more than $1 billion worth of the antiviral.

Morris’s job was to bend perception—and he also tried to bend the way that Washington perceived him. In 2009, he was hired to head the Washington office of Genentech, a Roche subsidiary. He became relentlessly acquisitive: three Porsches, multiple Cartiers and Rolexes, humidors filled with the finest cigars. Apparently, many of Morris’s extravagant purchases were bought with Genentech’s money, including a condo in San Francisco and a GMC Yukon.

Such a brazen scheme didn’t escape his superiors’ notice. While being presented by investigators with damning evidence of his malfeasance, Morris left the room to take a bathroom break and never returned. That afternoon, he went to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia, which he had paid a $150,000 initiation fee to join. That night, he retreated to a quiet corner of the club grounds and shot himself with a Smith & Wesson revolver. He was 38.

Y et such downfall narratives feel strangely dissonant. Although a handful of lobbyists may suffer a dramatic tumble from grace, the industry itself does nothing but boom. Each time a new reform surfaces, aimed at curtailing K Street’s power, influence peddlers figure out how to exploit the rules for greater influence and profit. Although Trump promised to drain this swamp, the swamp flourished. From 2016 to 2018, spending on K Street increased 9 percent , rising to $3.5 billion.

Washington lobbying firms have ballooned into conglomerates, resembling the multinational corporations that hire them. K Street currently consists of data analysts, pollsters, social-media mavens, crisis managers, grassroots organizers. Lobbying firms are one-stop shops for manipulating opinion—and are experts at image management, including their own: Their employees’ business cards identify them as “consultants” and “strategists,” now that everyone associates lobbying with sleaze.

Lobbying has disguised itself so well that it is often barely visible even to savvy Washington insiders. The Mullinses tell the story of Jim Courtovich, the head of a boutique public-relations firm and a close collaborator of Evan Morris’s. Courtovich’s business plan featured splashy parties that attracted top journalists and other prominent figures with whom he hoped to trade favors. Mingling with the media, the Mullinses write, Courtovich encouraged stories that might help his clients; in one case they cite, the goal was to damage a Saudi client’s rival. Starting in the fall of 2015, many such gatherings were hosted at a house his firm owned on Capitol Hill; presumably, the reporters who attended them had no idea that Saudi investors had financed the purchase of the building. In 2016, the authors note, Courtovich began working for the Saudi-government official who would later allegedly orchestrate the murder of The Washington Post ’s Jamal Khashoggi, a colleague of the journalists he assiduously cultivated.

As lobbying has matured, it has grown ever more adept at turning government into a profit center for its clients. Even Big Tech, which once treated Washington with disdainful detachment, seems to have felt the irresistible, lobbyist-enabled pull of chunky contracts with the feds. Such possibilities were part of the pitch to Amazon, for example, to erect a second corporate headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, enticed by the prospect of pursuing multibillion-dollar contracts with the likes of the CIA and the Pentagon. (Amazon has said that political considerations played no part in the company’s decision.)

For eager beneficiaries of government largesse—not to mention for their equally wolfish facilitators—a second Trump administration would represent a bonanza, unprecedented in the history of K Street. Trump’s plan to overturn a bureaucratic ethos that has prevailed since the late 19th century—­according to which good government requires disinterested experts, more loyal to the principles of public stewardship than to any politician—opens the way to installing cronies who will serve as handmaidens of K Street. The civil service, however beleaguered, has acted as an imperfect bulwark against the assault of corporate interests. Its replacement would be something close to the opposite. The hacks recruited to populate government departments will be primed to fulfill the desires of campaign donors and those who pay tribute to the president; they will trade favors with lobbyists who dangle the prospect of future employment in front of them. This new coterie of bureaucrats would wreck the competence of the administrative state—and the wolves of K Street will feast on the carcass of responsible governance.

This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “The Industry That Ate America.”

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Wolves review: What went right – and wrong – this season

Read i‘s reviews for all 20 Premier League clubs  here

What went well

It’s easy to forget now what a potential mess Wolves were in last summer .

Left managerless five days before the start of the season following the departure of Julen Lopetegui and numerous established players as the club sold the family silver to comply with PRS rules , they were universally tipped for the drop.

The fact they were safe with two months of the season to spare – and were above Chelsea and fighting for a European spot in March – was a testament to head coach Gary O’Neil .

That appointment is now seen as a masterstroke of which sporting director Matt Hobbs takes huge credit.

Gary O’Neil set for new and improved Wolves contract just one year after joining

O’Neil introduced a more attacking style of play , got the players running more, and, crucially, improved just about every player.

From 34-year-old Craig Dawson and Toti becoming twin towers of strength at the back to turning Hwang Hee-chan and Matheus Cunha into goalscorers up front, there were advances all over the pitch.

Hwang and Cunha ended with 12 Premier League goals each, a huge turnaround when you consider their return was three and two goals respectively last season, and that the last time a top-flight Wolves team had two players in double figures was 1979-80.

In addition, Nelson Semedo had his best season since arriving at Wolves, fellow wing back Rayan Ait-Nouri became one of the most sought-after young players in the Premier League, and Joao Gomes became a monster in midfield, earning a place in the Brazil squad.

What went badly

Not replacing those who left hit Wolves hard, both in terms of injuries to key players, their subsequent recovery time and the knock-on effect it had on results.

Those injuries critically exposed a lack of depth in the Premier League’s smallest squad, a mistake that Wolves simply cannot afford to repeat.

Warnings to strengthen the team in August and January went unheeded, even though O’Neil had been promised funds to do so.

How Gary O'Neil rebuilt Wolves - and avoided a FFP nightmare

Deals to sign Alex Scott – who joined Bournemouth – and Chelsea forward Armando Broja, who went to Fulham on loan, in each respective window reached advanced stages before Wolves pulled out.

Significant injuries to Hwang, star player Pedro Neto and Cunha meant O’Neil’s first choice front three never started a game after October.

Coupled with a groin injury and surgery to Dawson which ended his season prematurely, Wolves were more vulnerable defensively and less potent in attack.

All of this culminated in an end-of-season slump that saw Wolves end the campaign with a whimper, winning just one of their last 10 games.

Player of the season

From the leadership, power and versatility of Mario Lemina, the pace, trickery and quick feet of Ait-Nouri and the goals of Hwang and Cunha, there have been some tremendous performances this season.

But few would argue with the choice of Nelson Semedo as the player of the season.

The Portuguese has not only had his best season since joining Wolves from Barcelona in 2020 but has improved massively in the defensive side of his game. Again all credit to O’Neil and his staff.

Given that he usually plays as a wing back, Semedo just needs to add more goals to his game but that could still come, even at 30, given his level of improvement under O’Neil.

Breakthrough player

Rayan Ait-Nouri is another who has had his best season at Wolves, and to regular watchers, it is no surprise that he is catching the eye of Manchester City and Arsenal.

Not just the 'Korean Guy' - the rise of Wolves' Hwang Hee-chan

At 22, the Algerian is only going to get better which is some thought, given the strides he has made under O’Neil.

Thankfully for him, the solid form of Toti at left centre back means Ait-Nouri’s Achilles heel – defending – has rarely been exposed.

Instead, he has been left to do what he does best – using his pace and trickery to create chances, link the play and score the odd goal.

Best team performance

A 4-2 win at Chelsea on 4 February after falling behind – to complete consecutive away wins in the capital after beating Tottenham Hotspur 2-1 – will probably take the fans’ vote, and that of Matheus Cunha.

The Brazilian scored a hat-trick – his first in English football – in this memorable victory at Stamford Bridge which marked a seasonal low for Chelsea.

But arguably the 3-0 home win over Everton on December 30 was the most complete performance of the whole campaign as they outplayed Sean Dyche’s side and could have had several more goals.

The Score is Daniel Storey’s weekly verdict on all 20 Premier League teams’ performances. Sign up  here  to receive the newsletter every Monday morning next season

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History of Wolves Audio CD Library Binding – January 1, 2017

• Publisher Recorded Books
• Publication date January 1, 2017
• ISBN-10 1501941585
• ISBN-13 978-1501941580
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Recorded Books (January 1, 2017)
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501941585
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• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds

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