Beyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album

by Larry Woiwode

Nominated for several major awards and said by many to be one of the greatest novels of the century, Woiwode's epic is the story of four generations of the Neumiller family. "Nothing more beautiful and moving has been written in years". -- New York Times Book Review

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Family

625 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1975

About the author

Larry Woiwode was designated Poet Laureate of North Dakota by the Legislative Assembly in 1995. He served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973-74; and from 1983-88 was a tenured professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and director of its Creative Writing Program.

Larry Woiwode’s fiction has appeared in Antaeus, Antioch Review, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Harpers, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and many other publications; his poetry has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Poetry North, Tar River Poetry, Transatlantic Review, Works in Progress, and other publications and venues, including broadsides and anthologies.

His novels and his memoirs are widely acclaimed and his writings have been translated into a dozen languages and earned him international recognition: he is the recipient of the William Faulkner Foundation Award, 1969; has been a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971-72; a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, 1975; chosen by the American Association of Publishers for a novel to present to the White House Library, 1976; is recipient of an Award in Literature from the National Institute and American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1980; of the John Dos Passos Prize (for a diverse body of work), 1991; and of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2001. He has also received North Dakota’s highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, conferred by Governor Sinner, in 1992; and in 2011 received the Emeritus Award from the High Plains Awards Committee, for “A Body of Work as Vast as the West.” His recent publications include Words Made Fresh, and The Invention of Lefse, published in 2011 by Crossway Books. His new novel Blackburn Bay is nearly ready to be viewed by agents and publishers, and in 2010 he completed a new book of short stories

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larry Woiwode isn’t galloping through the pages of his novel – he is slow and thoughtful. He lets his narration charm a reader gradually and at last a novel effloresces like a rose showing all the beauty of the unhurried everyday life and revealing a whole spectrum of psychological nuances.

Her grief was dynamic, even when expressed in anger, and she was always busy, angrily busy, working to ease her grief. His sat in him like a stone.

Beyond the Bedroom Wall is an extremely lyrical novel written in an enthralling language.

Every night has its distinctive color, or layers of colors, like the layers of colors in a lake, and every one appears in a different form from the one before it.

If you learn to appreciate every seemingly insignificant moment of living, you can turn your existence into a treasure trove.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

From an interview with the author:

"In Beyond the Bedroom Wall, you seamlessly shift between different points of view and time periods to tell the Neumiller family’s saga. How did you approach writing a novel that encompasses so many distinct narrators and eras?

Larry Woiwode: Slowly. Pieces of the novel appeared over a ten-year period and I was working on parts of it before that. I had a college fascination in the unaccountable grotesque, call it metafiction, laboring under the influence of Beckett (especially Watt), Borges, Nabokov, Kafka, William Gass and the like. I believed this was the truth of my time, and to represent what is called reality in any other form would be a lie. I was living in a room on St. Marks Place before it became gentrified for a rent of nine dollars a week—not an aesthetic setting—and on a sunny fall afternoon it came to me that if I wanted to be absolutely honest, not lie an iota, I would have to admit the most significant influence in my life was my maternal grandmother. She guided me out of the speechlessness of grief after my mother’s death, when I was nine.

I sat and drafted a quick sketch of a scene centered on her. With a bit of work the sketch became more general, as the addition of specific details has the power to do, and an ending came that set my hair on end. I had been showing William Maxwell, whom I met the year before at an Arts Conference at the University of Illinois, some of my metafiction, and this sketch, now a story, I thought, I sent by mail, as I remember, rather than carrying it up to his office, as I’d done. I heard in a week that The New Yorker was taking it, my first real publication, and it set the direction for the rest of my work. The story falls at almost the exact center of Beyond the Bedroom Wall. The shifting points of view in the novel are meant to give as many characters as possible a voice in the story, the leaps in time to save the reader time. All interstitial material—call it transitional or descriptive material—went. "

[Interesting, i find it, that he came from PoMo but elected to cut down and focus on the personal - one can detect traces of Gass and others in the text, though they are off in the distance somewhere...]

******************************
The story begins like this:


"Every night when I'm not able to sleep, when scrolls of words and formulas unfold in my mind and faces of those I love, both living and dead, rise from the dark, accusing me of apathy, ambition, self-indulgence, neglect --- all of the accusations just --- and there's no hope of rest, I try again to retrace the street. It's an unpaved street and it's the color of my hand. It's made up mostly of the clayey gumbo from the flat and tilting farmland all around the village so small it can be seen through from all sides, and its ungraded surface is generally overrun with ruts that are slippery and water-filled in spring, ironlike in summer, furred in fall with frost as phosphorescent as mountainy ridges on the moon's crust, and in winter buried beyond all thought except for any thought that clay or gravel or the booted feet of people crossing ice-covered snow above might have. It's the main street of Hyatt, North Dakota, and it's one block long. I lived in Hyatt from the time I was born until I was six and returned only once, at the age of eight, wearing a plaid jacket exactly like my brother's, too light for the weather, and ran up and down this street with changed friends, playing hide and seek between buildings that stand deserted, now that time has had its diminishing effects."


An opening such as this tells me all I need to know about a writer I am reading for the first time: that he hears the music of prose; that there is just enough of the lyrical in his writing to move me, but not too much to irritate; that his technique is in perfect control; and that he has an eye for the significant detail, the telling detail. It also tells me that I am in the presence of a teller of the oldest stories – family and the blurring weight of ancestry, land, light and the indifferent presence of Nature.

The writing is sophisticated, complex, but subtly so – not showy or demonstrative, not pun-filled and playful – it is the flow of the telling that matters, the evocation of a Family. We shift perspective and time, we shift format and tone, but always delineated, demarcated, defined. It is conservative, one could say, with all the many meanings such a word contains - the past will be conserved regardless of our attempts to over-write it. It is in the earth and buried in our skin.

This is a wonderful work. A deeply moving, deeply engaging, deeply enriching work. It has traces of Cather, O'Connor and McCullers. It bears some similarity to Stegner, though it's ambition is greater and its ability to play with time and memory more pronounced. A masterpiece in the old style.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just re-read this book again and it keeps revealing layers and depth of character each time I read it. Sadly, it has gone out of print. You can still find it in libraries, though.

Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a literary family saga of immense power and lyricism. It's one of my top ten best novels, along with Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner. If you haven't read this one, you are missing a contemporary classic.

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Larry Woiwode's short stories about the Neumiller family in The New Yorker and Harper's before they were woven together into this richly emotional novel about a family of young children whose mother becomes ill and dies. Although there is a whole range of deeply felt emotions in the book, it is often the heartbreak of everyday life that permeates the work. Meawhile, there is a near-Proustian depth of detail in the account of lives lived in small midwestern towns, first in North Dakota and then Illinois.

Woiwode also captures the dynamics of family life, particularly in the close relationship between the narrator and his slightly older brother (a relationship celebrated, explored, and lamented in a sequel novel, "Born Brothers"). It's been years since I read "Beyond the Bedroom Wall," but there are moments in it almost seared into memory like film images. That is partly due to Woiwode's poetic gift for language that makes you want to read and savor every word on every page.

In later years, Woiwode returned to North Dakota and has lived there in a rural community in a kind of self-imposed spiritual exile. The early writings, in my opinion, are far superior to his later work. When he wrote "Beyond the Bedroom Wall," he was at the peak of his powers as a storyteller. Yes, it's a "great" American novel.

[Don Friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never heard of this author, loved this book. Multiple generations of a North Dakota/Illinois family, takes us through the struggles and warm and loving parts of the family over the decades, as America also changes. Struggled with one (intentionally) radically different chapter that takes us to Manhattan in the 60s. But overall, you get deeply involved with and caring about so many characters...

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5 stars
“...and went up the lane toward the road, glancing around at Charles as though his back got more vulnerable with each step” (54).
“...and piling up the rocks they dulled their scythes on…” (83).
“He slipped out of half sleep into skin cold and oily from sleeping in his clothes” (91).
“The footsteps came into the room, bringing along an aroma of the outdoor cold on foreign clothes…”(93).
“He kept frowning, with eyes that touched the cold in Martin’s bones…” (93).
“...but now I’m so fatigued and shaky I’m bumping into my own shadow” (111).
“...in that blizzard of silence that comes when one of us is being deceitful” (113).
“This observance of affection, without receiving any, seemed to me the burden of being an older brother, and still does” (145).
“He had a painful-looking crease in his neck from his clerical collar…” (148).
“...the prolonged, windswept, blizzard-flayed winters…” (150).
“They nodded, eager to get their hands behind the desk and onto the dovelike, cooing, feathery or whatever surface he was talking about” (152).
“...and sunlight coming through a window in the far wall fell over them with a warmth sunlight had nowhere else” (158).
“...while the dented and damaged dress form, made of varnished strips of paper lifting up in crisp translucent curves, stood above them, unmoving and silent, like a second, more permissive mother” (159).
“He stepped into the living room and strode around, displacing the air as none of them did…” (164).
“They’ll be necessary to each other the rest of their lives; the one with his passionate need to know and be told what everything means, the other already serene in his knowledge, and living among elements that are invisible and his own” (171).
“Her ‘Jiiiimmy’ has been more than once the swimming bees of serenity’s death” (186).
“Do the dead forget we sometimes didn’t love them, as we forget?” (200).
“...Orville Sanderson, a bachelor who drank too much, had a foul tongue, and hated children--perhaps from all those years of hearing recess--Catholic ones especially…”(210-211).
“...and his intestines sway to one side as if to make room for greater fear” (242).
“...then Jay might blame himself for it with his flaying conscience” (301).
“All his life he’s felt as tangled and stranded within himself as nails in a keg. The only way to freedom was to pull a tangle loose and hammer them into a new day” (322).
“But Charles could see creases of inconsistency appear around her mouth, and then she turned to the stove, blushing, and tried to conceal a smile” (336).
“...the unruffled blue of the lake reflecting the cloudless sky, as though blue were being distilled over the surface in front of them” (338).
“...Charles saw himself walking the boundaries of the farm, and felt the constriction and smallness of all he did and the meagerness of its effect within his known world” (338).
“...a pine-studded peninsula where long-legged birds ran on a ray of sand like a wisp of sun…” (344).
“...and he glanced up at Father from penitentially lowered lids” (345).
“...held in the jaws of clothespins” (382).
“Candles were so much more appropriate for a celebration than electric lights. With candles burning, there was room for darkness, for the emotions that arose only in subdued light…” (418-419).
“Their pasts were nearly identical and, as long as they didn’t limit them with language, remained intact, and many of the years of them were interwound with the influence of their grandfather” (450).
“Tim’s eyebrows raised so much he should have been wide-eyed, but his lids stayed at half-mast” (461).
“They all leaned back from the conversation, as if a corpus of their creation was burning on the table, or about to be burned” (462).
“Why did he associate coffee with funerals and death, and why drink so much of it if he did? Tasting the edge? Pouring through to his past?” (463).
*And here we have the title explanation. I can identify with this. (467).
“...and stared at him with deep-set eyes, which made him recognize again how brown eyes were better for expressing emotional concern than gray or green or blue…” (481).
“...her hands so restless the silver bracelets on her wrists clashed and sent riverlike reflections over the ceiling” (486).
“Although he was charitable, if someone came to the house and talked a great deal of nonsense, he’d be prompted to say when they left, ‘An empty wagon makes the most noise’” (490).
“The javelin was outlawed while Tom was in school, because a bystander has been pierced by one. He lived” (499).
“...but at night, yes, I crawl out of that facade, turn clinically bonkers, and strive to write” (543).
“He’d read at a slow rate, pursing his lips around the words as though forming sculptures of theri sounds…” (546).
“The wind’s going everywhere except where it’s been” (555).
“The poet sighed again--two lengthy blue plumes…”(560).
“His voice went up the scale and out of reach and cracked with a sound so shrill and unmusical it was as if the sky overarching this part of the city had been shattered and the snowflakes were broken fragments of it and floating down around them both” (561).
“...a blessing, in or out of disguise” (607).

[Yona · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall, I'd characterize my feeling toward this novel as "disconnected." Some of the characters, like Martin, I felt like I knew and understood well. Others blurred in and out of each other (Jerome and Charles, for much of the story) or weren't mentioned often enough for me to keep straight (Martin's siblings). They were a bunch of floating names. It would've helped me to have had a family tree or list of characters somewhere, especially for a story like this, focused on the family's life. During many chapters, I was not sure who was speaking (or why there was suddenly an "I" at all) until late into the chapter, and for others I'm still not sure who was narrating; there is no good reason for that.

Characters weren't the only thing that were all over the map for me. Stronger chronology would've helped me spend less time going, "Wait, what? Where am I?" I don't know that it even had to be told in chronological order (which it wasn't...), it just needed to be more clearly marked what was happening when. Partly I believe the author's intention with the "slipperiness" of time throughout the story and with the descriptions of photos was to demonstrate...moments. The way we are drawn back to memories and they replay over and over until they swallow us, until they morph and distort. The way the right (or wrong) kind of moments can expand into infinity even though they may last only an instant in real time. But in many, many scenes it was hard for me to tell where memory stopped and started and where the "now" of the scene was. I kept being startled by people walking into a scene, realizing that was happening in the speaker's memory at a different time.

On top of that, I found the pacing for the entire novel was too slow for my tastes. For example, did we really need to watch CJC build his father's coffin step-by-step? Couldn't that have been summarized? I realize that partly it's because this story was written during and about earlier days, but for me it added to the distance I felt to the novel as a whole. I mean, the entire last third of the story was one giant, lugubrious, never-ending funeral. Worse, for the grandfather especially, I didn't get information about their bonds to other characters until after they had died, which left me very indifferent to it all as a reader. I felt no loss, only the uncomfortable sensation of projecting my own remembered grief from my real life onto these characters. For Alpha's death...we were told she was going to die before she died! Total foreshadowing failure. It killed the element of shock and surprise when she finally did die and, again, made the entire thing drag on forever.

All that said, there were certain moments I enjoyed and identified with, along with some lovely bits of writing. I liked Jerome and Martin, and I related to Alpha. And Father what's-his-name (long and barely pronounceable.) I stuck through it for a reason. Partly I think what I disliked in this book were the parts that mirrored painful parts of my own life, and I guess that's a job well done.

Ultimately, I don't regret reading it. I feel like my mother might enjoy reading it, so I'll send it her way. However, I don't expect to reread it anytime soon.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story that follows four generations of a family who lived first in a small North Dekoda town and then moved to Illinois. I enjoyed the details the author put in of what time was like during the period the book took place--mid-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century if I have that correct--and enjoyed the characters in the book as well. It was very fascinating getting different glimpses of events from multiple viewpoints. There were times I thought the book was slightly drawn out, but overall, I'm glad I read it.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first take on this book when I picked it up from the library was that it was going to be a long read (the book is almost two inches thick). That didn't prove to be a problem as the story that chronicles the life of three generations of a family from a farm in North Dakota from the start of the 20th century up until the "modern" 1960s is both enthralling and captivating.

This is definitely one of the best books I've read in quite some time and I recommend it strongly.

[Betsy Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Big, heavy sigh. This book gets such accolades that it’s embarrassing to have a different viewpoint. Maybe old age makes me less tolerant of huge books, but after 500 pages I began to feel abused by the author’s descriptive language. I mean, after 600 pages, when a character goes to return some books to the library, I think, please, just return the books and get back into the car. But no, we have to get a full description of the outside of the building, including what kind of windows, what kind of window frames, walking through the plate glass doors. Naturally we’ll need to know what kind of bookshelves, the layout of the tables, the material of the tables, and of course how the light reflects off the tables. This book could have been 100 pages shorter if we hadn’t been privy to the color and effects that light had falling on objects and the multitude of emotions this light produced. This is all before we reach the librarian. I’m tired.

[Kurishin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A family saga that chronicles a Midwestern Catholic family in the first 3/4 of the 20th century, Woiwode manages the plot and character development in a non-linear fashion, leading me to question either his writing or my reading at times. The latter was the issue, though as with any book of this length, tighter editing would have been appreciated. The wisdom in this novel needs to be gleaned by the reader. It is one of those novels that is of its time but timeless because of the quality of the writing. Woiwode's style is original and I would be surprised if anyone ever writes a novel like this again about these subjects with so much authenticity and authority. This novel deserves a reprint and promotion campaign. Has NYRB written all over it, doesn't it?

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was hard to get a copy of this book that seems to no longer be in print, but since it had such great reviews and award nominations, I kept searching and got a used copy. I kept waiting to be awestruck but it did not strike me as compelling. I struggled to finish it (it is very long) and was confused about who was the author of each chapter as it switched around. I ended up skipping a few chapters toward the end and but don’t feel like I missed much. The writing style was lyrical but it did not resonate with me as it did with others who have reviewed it and rated it among their top books of all time.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had a slow start as I was new to the writer's endless description but after reading about his detailed writing I let that go and was immersed into the story. Great story of the love of a family and all their stories within one.

[Fred Eisenhut · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would put this down on my list of Great American novels. Awesome.

[Ron Antonucci · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf

[Richard Ravin]

A moving and masterful novel. I was content to live in its world forever.

[Emily Ver Steeg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very good, and I’m sad it seems to have been forgotten about. I think it should be considered a modern classic—required reading.

[Pam Fisher · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I learned that the author had submitted several of the chapters as stories in various magazines it helped to think of each chapter as a separate essay or story. The reason this was helpful was because the author presented the story via different points of view and hopping back and forth in time and place. It's a book so full that I wish I could read it in concert with someone else so that we could compare our thoughts and ideas about. I will likely read this book again.

[Neill Goltz · Rating 3 out of 5]

My "get in touch with my North Dakota-Minnesota roots". My sophomore roommate at Brown - Josh Lippmann from just outside Rochester, NY - was reading it in the summer of '73 and I did the opening chapter then where the summoned-home son buries his father.

Had other things frying that summer and didn't pursue it then, but now am quite glad to have done so.

[Kate Pierson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, rating system, I'm not sure about you. As far as the writing goes, this is a five-star book. Beyond the Bedroom Wall has some beautiful passages and gave me a lot to think about. My personal rating, though, is four stars because I never really cared much about the characters.

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Long, long, long, and for much of that time I was confused about the novel's true protagonist. Some nice imagery, but very, very long to read.

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A haunting, beautiful story of a family

[Geoffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 'big' book by a great neglected writer. A variety of moods to match the variety of generations and eras of this family
.

[Eric]

According to the Inter-net, this book's sold over a million copies. Really?

[Jodi Boe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

[jt · Rating 5 out of 5]

No comment.

[Kim]

Only made it to page 280. Out of sheer boredom and disinterest, I have put it down. Around page 200, it picked up but did not sustain me considering I'm not even halfway finished! I noticed a depth and higher level of intrigue during the female-centric chapters.