For part of the two years that I taught as a lecturer in the University of Minnesota English Department, I shared an office with Shannon Olson, who at the time was completing an M.F.A. and working for the department chair. Little did I know that within a few years Shannon would publish two novels with major publishers, Welcome to My Planet (Penguin, 2000) and Children of God Go Bowling (Viking, 2004).

I finally read Welcome to My Planet. The book’s narrator—who shares the author’s name—is an outspoken young woman who is nevertheless held back by self-doubt. As the story opens, Shannon feels stuck in her life: she has just turned thirty and feels dissatisfied with her annoying boyfriend and boring job. In therapy from the book’s opening, she manages to build up the nerve to make a decisive break, dumping both boyfriend and job, moving back in with her parents, and enrolling in the graduate English program at the University of Minnesota. The rest of the story concerns her expanding new life.

The voices of two other women also figure prominently in the book: Shannon’s therapist and her mother, Flo. Shannon’s journey is as much about discovering her mother—what to emulate and admire in her, and what to avoid—as it is about discovering herself. And her therapy provides an important vehicle for her new self-understanding.

Olson’s writing is best when dealing with her narrator’s family history and romantic relationships. She paints a vivid portrait of family life and the mother-daughter bond.

The book’s form is another of its strengths. Olson keeps this confessional story light in part by her choice of form: chapters broken into sections that alternate between a narrative of events in the present and a running general commentary, including rumination on past events, family history, and regional character.

On that issue of region, Shannon has a hard time imagining herself living anywhere other than Minnesota—a fact that she attributes to her fear of “the possibility of infinite possibility.” She envisions that fear and its limitations this way:

I picture myself in a hot air balloon just floating off somewhere, higher and higher in the cold, dark air. Eventually that balloon is going to pop. My family, and this place—Minnesota, this silly place with its terribly cold winters and emotionally repressed Scandinavians—are like sandbags that weigh the balloon down, the stakes and ropes that tether it to the ground. Without them I’d be frightened to death of where I might wind up.

Despite those possibilities that exist elsewhere, Shannon stays near home to explore the different possibilities presented by a deeper knowledge of family and place. And there is no indication that she is any poorer for doing so.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Books/Literature.