Books

reviewed by Peter Sandstrom

Among the most satisfying reading I do is the pleasure of finding a book whose paragraphs are so intense and thoughtful that I choose to read the volume only one chapter at a time, savoring the images and reflection that the author has invoked for me. Kathleen Norris’ Dakota has provided such reading for me this past season and I am pleased to pass on this recommendation for your own reading time.

Dakota documents, through a variety of means, a year’s worth of seasons of Norris’s life in a town of diminutive size in the northwest corner of south Dakota. Moving there from New York City to reclaim her grandmother’s inheritance of a small cattle farm on the outskirts of town, she paints for her readers the panoramic mural of the land, sky, wind, and peoples in her portion of the Western Great Plains.

My affection was garnered for this work immediately because of its prairie setting; my mother’s family were territorial homesteaders for three generations in Minnesota and the Dakotas. I am willing prey for just about any reflective (or even not so reflective) regional writing. The alluring soul of this autobiographical meditation is the journey back toward a life of faith. Her spiritual rootage is in the Christian faith which made the journey even more intriguing and connected for me. Throughout the chapters, often paragraph by paragraph, the author had me comparing my own comings and goings through the different pathways of Christian experience with hers. We have both experienced this American century and this particular place, this hilly, grassy, and cold prairie section of America. Such willingness to examine openly her growth in and out of faith is a great service to others in similar life journeys and it is a risky and vulnerable venture that not many Christian writers are willing to take today.

Throughout these pages, Kathleen Norris documents the two rivers of Christian sources which feed her thoughtful struggle with a return to Christian consciousness and worship. She is equally served by (as she serves) the Presbyterian congregation which claims her membership and her layperson’s share of voluntary time and by the Benedictine monastic community that has existed for nearly a century out in the hills of the outlying countryside. To read through Dakota is to be treated to an excursion through the church year, the gossip circuit of church basement suppers, a tantalizing sampling of monastic history and literature, a social and political history and literature, a social and political history of the Western prairie, four seasons’ worth of Great Plains weather reports, and a diary of a spiritual journey of a woman poet who seeks to recognize in herself both the child of Dakota and the child of God. I think that pietist readers who claim their own need to account for the spirit of a particular place as a part of what makes them human beings, whole Christian persons, will find a kindred spirit and a helpful narrative in this well-crafted book by Kathleen Norris.