As a young man in Minnesota, working first as a logger clear-cutting the last virgin forests and then as a digger in a road-building gang, and not making good money at either, Einar had been attracted to the Communist notion that his labor was being exploited by East Coast capitalists. Then one day, listening to a Communist fulminator in Pioneer Square, he’d had a eureka moment in which he realized that the way to get ahead in his new country was to exploit some labor himself. With several of the younger brothers who’d followed him to America, he went into business as a road-building contractor. To keep busy in the frozen months, he and his brothers also founded a small town on the banks of the upper Mississippi and opened a general store. His politics may still have been radical at that point, because he extended endless credit to the Communist farmers, many of them Finnish, who were struggling to make a living beyond the grasp of East Coast capital. The store quickly became a money-loser, and Einar was at the point of selling his share in it when a former friend of his, a man named Christiansen, opened a rival store across the street. Purely out of spite (according to Dorothy), Einar operated the store for another five years, right through the Great Depression’s nadir, accumulating unpayable chits from every farmer within ten miles of town, until poor Christiansen was finally driven into bankruptcy. Einar then relocated to Bemidji, where he did good business as a road builder but ended up selling his company at a disastrously low price to an oily-mannered associate who’d pretended to have socialist sympathies.

America, for Einar, was the land of unSwedish freedom, the place of wide-open spaces where a son could still imagine he was special. But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. Having achieved, through his native intelligence and hard labor, a degree of affluence and independence, but not nearly enough of either, he became a study in anger and disappointment. After his retirement, in the 1950s, he began sending his relatives annual Christmas letters in which he lambasted the stupidity of America’s government, the inequities of its political economy, and the fatuity of its religion-drawing, for example, in one particularly caustic Christmas greeting, a cunning parallel between the unwed madonna of Bethlehem and the “Swedish whore” Ingrid Bergman, the birth of whose own “bastard” (Isabella Rossellini) had lately been celebrated by American media controlled by “corporate interests.” Though an entrepreneur himself, Einar detested big business. Though he’d made a career of government contracts, he hated the government as well. And though he loved the open road, the road made him miserable and crazy. He bought American sedans with the biggest engines available, so that he could do ninety and a hundred on the dead-flat Minnesota state highways, many of them built by him, and roar past the stupid people in his way. If an oncoming car approached him at night with its high beams on, Einar’s response was to put his own high beams on and leave them on. If some pinhead dared to try to pass him on a two-lane road, he floored the accelerator to keep pace and then decelerated to prevent the would-be passer from getting back in line, taking special pleasure when there was danger of a collision with an oncoming truck. If another driver cut him off or refused him the right of way, he pursued the offending car and tried to force it off the road, so that he could jump out and shout curses at its driver. (The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.) Einar was seventy-eight when an extremely poor driving decision forced him to choose between a head-on crash and a deep ditch by the side of Route 2. His wife, who was sitting in the passenger seat and, unlike Einar, was wearing a seat belt, lingered for three days at the hospital in Grand Rapids before expiring of her burns. According to the police, she might have survived if she hadn’t tried to pull her dead husband out of their burning Eldorado. “He treated her like a dog all his life,” Walter’s father said afterward, “and then he killed her.”

Of Einar’s four kids, Gene was the one without ambition who stayed close to home, the one who wanted to enjoy life, the one with a thousand friends. This was partly his nature and partly a conscious reproof of his father. Gene had been a high-school hockey star in Bemidji and then, following Pearl Harbor, to the chagrin of his antimilitarist father, an early enlister in the Army. He served two tours in the Pacific, emerging both unwounded and unpromoted past PFC, and returned to Bemidji to party with his friends and work at a garage and ignore his father’s stern injunctions to take advantage of the G.I. Bill. It wasn’t clear that he would have married Dorothy if he hadn’t made her pregnant, but once they were married he set about loving her with all the tenderness he believed his father had denied his mother.

That Dorothy ended up working like a dog for him anyway, and that his own son Walter ended up hating him for this, was just one of those twists of family fate. Gene at least did not insist, the way his father had, that he was superior to his wife. On the contrary, he enslaved her with his weakness-his penchant for drink in particular. The other ways in which he came to resemble Einar were similarly roundabout in origin. He was belligerently populist, defiantly proud of his unspecialness, and attracted, therefore, to the dark side of right-wing politics. He was loving and grateful to his wife, he was famed among his friends and fellow vets for his generosity and loyalty, and yet, ever more frequently as he got older, he was given to scalding eruptions of Berglundian resentment. He hated the blacks, the Indians, the well-educated, the hoity-toity, and, especially, the federal government, and he loved his freedoms (to drink, to smoke, to hole up with his buddies in an ice-fishing hut) the more intensely for their being so modest. He was ugly to Dorothy only when she suggested, with timid solicitude-for she mostly blamed Einar, not Gene, for Gene’s shortcomings-that he should drink less.

Gene’s share of Einar’s estate, though much diminished by the self-spiting terms of Einar’s sale of his business, was large enough to put him within reach of the little roadside motel he’d long believed it would be

“neat” to own and manage. The Whispering Pines, when Gene bought it, had a stove-in septic line and a serious mold problem and was already too close to the shoulder of a highway heavily trafficked by ore trucks and due to be widened soon. Behind it was a ravine full of trash and eager young birch trees, one of them growing up through a mangled grocery cart that would eventually strangle and stunt it. Gene should have known that a more cheerful motel was bound to appear on the local market, if he could only be a little patient. But poor business decisions have their own momentum. To invest wisely, he would have had to be a more ambitious kind of person, and since he wasn’t this other kind of person, he was impatient to get his error over with, to shoot his wad and begin the work of forgetting how much money he’d spent, literally forgetting it, literally remembering a sum more like the one he later told Dorothy that he’d paid. There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness. Gene no longer had to fear a big disappointment in the future, because he’d already accomplished it; he’d cleared that hurdle, he’d permanently made himself a victim of the world. He took out a crushing second mortgage to pay for a new septic system, and every subsequent disaster, large or small-a pine tree falling through the office roof, a cash-paying guest in Room 24 cleaning walleyes on the bedspread, the Vacancy sign’s neon NO burning through most of a July Fourth weekend before Dorothy noticed it and turned it off-served to confirm his understanding of the world and his own shabby place in it.