A heart as cold as Arctic snow

EARLY in Vendela Vida’s second novel, “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name,” Clarissa Iverton learns that the man who raised her after her mother abandoned the family wasn’t actually her father. When Clarissa discovers that her fiance was also in on the secret, her outrage and shock take her out of New York and all the way to Lapland, where she was born. There, above the Arctic Circle, Clarissa finds out more than she had bargained for -- about her true father, her mother, the complex layers of identity and the inescapable legacy of violence.

There is much to admire in this brief novel. Vida offers precise, revealing details to describe her characters -- like Clarissa’s developmentally disabled younger brother, Jeremy, who unravels balled-up socks and is crazy about plastic bags but can only be trusted with ones too small to fit over his head. And in Clarissa, Vida has created a complex and not always likable heroine who is driven by loss and confusion. In the aftermath of her putative father’s death, she displays anger, rashness and discomfort with others that bespeak a flesh-and-blood woman who carries real-life scars, and whose faults -- and ability to reinvent herself -- suggest she has more in common with her mother than she thinks.

The portrait of Clarissa’s mother is harrowing and sad. Through a series of flashbacks, we see Olivia Iverton as a magnetic but self-involved woman who is always yearning for something more. A caring and nurturing mother she is not. She gets annoyed at Clarissa for wearing a seat belt because it will ruin the ironing job she did on her daughter’s dress. She demonstrates more affection for the neighbor’s cat than she does for her own family, and she hums tunes that no one recognizes so they can’t join in. As a child, Clarissa is so desperate for Olivia’s attention that she is tempted to lie about not doing her homework so that her mother will reprimand her. And on the day of Clarissa’s abandonment -- perhaps the novel’s most devastating moment -- Clarissa shows up 15 minutes late to meet her mother at the Poughkeepsie mall, only to be told by someone working there that Olivia had said “to tell you she got tired of waiting.”

Though these episodes are effective, the novel truly takes flight once Clarissa crosses the Arctic Circle. In Lapland, she encounters her second potential father -- Eero Valkeapaa, a priest and leader of the indigenous Saami and her mother’s first husband. Clarissa learns about the struggles of the Saami and their efforts to sustain their native villages by producing handicrafts and exporting reindeer meat. She also learns about the protests over the building of the Alta dam in the mid-1970s, which would have flooded the historic Saami town of Maze. The protests galvanized the previously isolated Saami villages, and inspired Olivia -- then a graduate student writing a dissertation on indigenous peoples -- to join the resistance. The dam was ultimately built on a smaller scale, sparing the town of Maze, but at great personal cost to Olivia -- and ultimately to her daughter.

The second half of “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” is filled with captivating details of life in Lapland, particularly about the practice of reindeer herding. We learn, for example, that the Saami use snowmobiles or “scooters” to herd the animals, and that reindeer can be identified by markings cut into their ears that are listed in a book-length directory. And as the young herder Henrik informs Clarissa when she inquires about the size of his herd, one doesn’t ask a Saami “how many reindeer he owns. It’s like me asking you how much money is in your bank account.”

Henrik and his relatives, particularly his aunt and famed Saami healer Anna Kristine, help Clarissa in her search for her biological father. They guide her from Kautokeino -- where they live and where her mother once stayed -- to other places that might hold clues about her parents, including the Ice Hotel in Alta. And as a feverish Clarissa moves farther into Lapland and into her mother’s past, her search becomes more surreal, internal as well as external, until it is not entirely clear -- or even important -- how much of what she’s experiencing is “real” and how much takes place within her own psyche. This impressionistic quality is reminiscent of other surreal literary searches, like Matsuo Basho’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “When We Were Orphans.” In this case, as in those earlier works, the blurring of the line between real and imaginary underscores a larger truth -- that any search for a lost person or a buried piece of history is ultimately a search for the self.

Although Clarissa’s story is intriguing, a few things get overlooked in the telling. For one thing, Clarissa appears to completely discount Richard Iverton in favor of the mysterious father she’s never met; her lack of mourning feels inexplicable and false. For another, Clarissa never contemplates or even acknowledges what it means that she is actually half-Saami. A couple of plot twists are too convenient, particularly the turn of events that allow Clarissa to travel alone to the encounter where she learns the fate of her parents. More seriously, it is hard to believe that Clarissa is shocked to learn that Richard Iverton was not her father, since she knew about her mother’s first husband. And Olivia herself is hard to get a handle on. We never get a real sense, for example, of why she was so fascinated by the Saami, and her coldness toward her loved ones is extreme to the point of pushing credulity.

Some of the difficulty in entering the hearts of the characters may be related to the spareness of Vida’s prose. While her taut, economical language ensures that the story never veers into melodrama, sometimes Vida holds the reins too tightly. When Clarissa fights with her fiance, Pankaj, at the start of the novel, we don’t know enough about her, or about their history, to feel much of anything. The effect is something like overhearing a heated argument in a restaurant; there isn’t enough build-up or context to sympathize with either combatant, or to cut them slack for their slips into meanness. Sometimes Clarissa’s emotions are told to us instead of portrayed, and Vida’s writing is occasionally too self-conscious (“I turned the blade so it was facing me, as though I was setting a table for company. Then I turned the blade outward. Inward, outward, inward, outward.”). And after the build-up to a series of truly heartbreaking revelations, the conclusion of the novel feels rushed and incomplete.

At its best, “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” is an incisive account of how someone can -- and cannot -- escape the legacy of the past; an example of the high cost of unearthing the truth; and a rich portrait of indigenous people trying to preserve their way of life. In the end, though, the novel is a bit like the vanished mother and the frozen landscape it portrays -- sometimes beautiful, but ultimately remote. *