The Expeditions

By Karl Iagnemma

Book Overview

From award-winning author Iagnemma comes a fierce and gorgeous story of an estranged father and sons unlikely journey though the wilderness of 19th-century America. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385335954
• ISBN13: 9780385335959
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Worth Reading and Re-Reading

Karl Iagnemma's novel "The Expeditions" is a brilliantly told tale, rich in details of history, place, and character. Iagnemma understands his characters and their situation deeply, and with critical sympathy. Their story, for all its oddity or strangeness, seems normal or natural or almost every-day. It is a novel that invites re-reading, and maybe another re-reading. Bert Hornback

Excellent, could not put it down

Iagnemma's work is both historically significant AND accurate. This novel outshines many other historical fiction adventures I've read. I liked this book as much as, or more than, James Fenimore Cooper's works. The characters are contrasted perfectly, the nature and beauty of the Expedition through 16 year-old Elisha's eyes is poignantly portrayed in this coming of age novel. It is hard to believe this is a first attempt novel. This novel has captured, as a first novel, the beauty, historical importance, literary accuracy, and character development that many seasoned writers cannot accurately portray! I just received my MA in American History, and I'm really not a fan of fiction of any kind. But, I thought I would give this novel a try. I am so glad I did! This novel really helps you escape your daily routine, teaches you something (the religiously burned over areas of ante-bellum America and a new sense of nationalism), and truly captured my attention. I am not one to be able to read with the TV or radio on, however, nothing distracted me from Iagnemma's novel. The scene by the fire in the trapper's cabin in upper Michigan is one I won't soon forget: This is what great novels are made of. Move over, Mr. Cooper. Mr. Iagnemma: I can't wait for more!

An Illuminating and Moving Historical Novel

On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction is, for my money, the best American short story collection debut of the 21st century--funny and weighty, as cutting edge as the latest development in engineering and as old as brokenheartedness. The Expeditions is a different animal altogether--but it is equally impressive. The novel has its funny moments--the Rev. Stone notes that he doesn't want to stay in a certain inn because it strikes him as too "characterful"; Suzette the steely halfbreed abuse victim dreams of a place where she hears "the land is free and the soil is good, and there is fishing and hunting and the winters are not so cold"--yes, that promised land, Milwaukee. But this novel is most impressive for the way that, in telling the story of two men--the widower, opium-addicted, preacher father; and his wayward, would-be naturalist son Elisha--Iagnemma manages to illuminate such a broad and overlooked swath of American history and geography. We learn in vivid and convincing detail about the 1840's, and about that tier of land from the northern Appalachian trail to the Great Lakes, so familiar to migrant New Englanders in search of better farmland and better lives, or simply escape from the strictures of family and community. We learn along the way about religion from the old-line Congregationalism of New Hampshire to the Millerites who believed the world would end, like, tomorrow; also of the challenge religion faced in the dawning of the age of Darwin, when the great mysteries of Creation faced the peril of being explained naturally. The Expeditions also introduces us to the Chippewa, to Americans high and low, racist and not, hucksterish and gullible, and to the everyday challenges everyone faced in the days when the country and the industrial revolution were both in their infancy. And we learn about all these things without even realizing it, for the story of father and son separating and then reuniting is a familiar one, but no less enthralling for that. This is a moving and illuminating novel written with gravity and grace--a truly substantial book. I highly recommend it.

Woe and wonder in the wilderness

I finished this novel last weekend on a long, turbulent flight home from New England, and while I might have been easily pulled from the fictive dream of a lesser novel by the shuddering plane and the peripheral flashing of wing lights and the pervasive, sour smell of bad, coach-fare food warmed in plastic--instead, thankfully, I was trekking through the upper peninsula of Michigan, bearing witness to the quiet, naturalistic transformation of Elisha Stone, to the aching urgency of his consumptive father's pursuit. This is a novel that fulfills the promise of Iagnemma's wonderful collection of stories, _On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction_, one that finds its protagonist on the frontier of his own maturity. A bildungsroman with a convincing, and nearly flawlessly researched, eye for the nuances of setting and history, _The Expeditions_ marks the development of a major talent. And, with all due respect to a previous reviewer, the assertion that a novel is seriously flawed because it makes repeated use of a certain punctuation mark is the sophomoric critical equivalent of defaming a concerto because of a preponderance of sixteenth-notes. This is a novel that pays dividends, one that obviously cost the writer more than the time spent writing it. Here is a work as engaging and emotionally rewarding as the lives it dreams into existence.

An early bid for the Best of 2008

I read "The Expeditions" straight through and found it as enthralling as Iagnemma's excellent story collection. The sentences are pitch perfect, lovely astonishing, and the portrait of America and its religious, atavistic impulses make this an important (and enthralling) national saga. Buy it. You won't regret it.