When I go to see a movie or read a book, I am hypercritical of obvious emotional manipulation. Like most people I do want to have an emotional experience maybe even a catharsis of sorts, but I feel like walking out if the creator’s manipulation is heavy handed.

Virgil Wander was not overtly manipulative. It kept me guessing as to what exactly was going on. Were it a painting I’d say it belonged to the genre of magical realism. I’m not sure if that genre exists in fiction. Enger is a very talented and evocative author. The eponymous main character is often vertiginous and I was a bit dizzy trying to determine what was “real” from what was imagined.

Set in Minnesota on Lake Superior, oddly in Bob Dylan’s home town, it is a cold and rather inhospitable place, but the damnedest things keep happening. The people are poor and the place is run down, like much of America’s Rust Belt. Strange tragedies and equally strange synchronicity and visions occur. The people of the town are grittily resilient and many are heroic. There is an underlying belief in many of them that they can make something good happen in spite of all the adversity they face.

In short, it reflects much of today’s America in an allegorical way. If we Americans believe in the good in most people and embrace it, we will succeed as a diverse people. There are broken families made whole, and magical kites, one of the pervasive symbols in the book. By the time the good stuff starts to happen, I am thoroughly invested in the characters, which for me is a real feat.

Two small criticisms, the sort of post script at the end is a little sappy and in the early stages of the book I tended to get the names and identities of some of the characters confused. The latter is probably my own weakness and I had to do a bit of backtracking.

Overall, I thoroughly recommend this book, especially to readers in the US and Canada, to whom it should be very pertinent.