62 pages • 2 hours read
Emily FridlundHistory of Wolves
Emily FridlundFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 20-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary
Linda works as a temp at a barge in Minneapolis in her twenties. While working one day, she receives a call about her mother from a woman she attends church with. She tells Linda that the cabin is “run-down” (246) and that her mother is living in the shed. She hopes Linda will speak with her mother.
Soon after this call, Linda goes to a Christian Science service. There, she learns that they don’t believe in death, “only the next phase” (247), which is not dissimilar from life. She listens to the testimonies of several people, ending with an elderly woman acknowledging her former, false belief that her husband had died; the church has shown her that there “is no death” and “it’s not what you do but what you think that matters […] Heaven and Hell are ways of thinking” (249).
Linda decides to leave Minneapolis. After she’s packed, she goes to Rom’s apartment, slips into bed with him, and feels comforted by how tightly he pulls her in. He begins to wake and holds her tighter, but when she playfully fights back, she accidentally knees him hard in the chest. He realizes she’s leaving and wonders why she won’t allow herself to be happy. She tells him, “Don’t be a baby” (252), repeating Patra’s words to Leo a decade ago. Rom tells her that the “little kid” she told him about long ago was “the easiest prey in the world” (253). For a moment, she thinks he means Paul, and she panics, becoming defensive. She throws the knife he’d given her toward him, but he tells her to keep it, calling her “Fool Scout” (254).
On the bus back to Loose River, Linda thinks of the woman from the church, her words, “It’s not what you do but what you think that matters” (254) echoing through her mind. Suddenly, she thinks of Mr. Grierson: of how hard it must have been to leave California for the cold and empty woods, but also how comforting it might have been to see the girls all bundled up. She imagines him seeing it as a fresh start: “It’s not what you think but what you do that matters” (255). She then thinks that the photos found in his apartment were giftwrapped, like he wanted someone to find them. The bus fishtails momentarily out of control and everyone gasps, but it is soon righted, and they continue their journey.
Chapter 21 Summary
During the trial, Linda admits she never thought to call 911. She didn’t think of getting any help, only of getting the Tylenol. She doesn’t admit, though, that when she looked back at Patra as she left for the store, she thought Patra had been mouthing something, as though “yelling without sound” (256). She thought it might have been anything from “THANKYOU” to “HELPUS” (256). She ran through the woods toward town, immediately comforted by being outside.
Linda, years later, clarifies that the woods she sees now are not the woods she’d known as a child; they’ve transformed again and again over the years. When she’d pray as a child, she always included the woods—though she could feel in its power that it never needed it.
Linda makes note of every place she passes in town before stopping in the drugstore. She’s asked by the cashier, Sarah, who Linda also goes to school with, what she needs. Uncertain, Linda describes Paul’s symptoms as her own. Sarah urges her to call a doctor. Once she’s left the store, she stands outside city hall lighting her candy on fire, hoping someone might stop her for arson. When no one does, she goes to various places, thinking she might see her mom or dad or just someone else. Later, she’d learn that she had an hour before Paul slipped into a coma.
Now in a church, she thinks the only prayer she knows: a repetition of her prayer for her family, Tameka, and animals from her childhood, with the addition of Paul. When she thinks of Patra, though, Linda believes she has somehow pleased her by only getting the Tylenol and returning; that she’d been “heroic [by] how little [she’d] accomplished” (265). She puts the four tens in the offering box and leaves.
She remembers the woods from her childhood as “a kind of nursery, for not thinking, for just seeing and walking along” (265). She liked taking account of everything she saw, of everything she already understood about the woods.
On the way back to the Gardners’s, a family offers Linda a ride. They drive her all the way to the Gardners’s, the woman watching her carefully, but Linda says nothing about Paul. She considers it but worries that telling would be “the end of Janet and Europa for good, the end of everything worthwhile” (268).
That fall, the woods had changed for Linda. She begins to see them scientifically, noticing the Earth’s orbit and its effect on the weather. Abe, one of Linda’s dogs who is almost as old as she is, dies. As she buries him, she wonders what life would be like if they never find life outside of Earth. She is incredibly lonely after Abe’s death, and after Leo and Patra leave, and it’s a state she’ll always exist in now.
Chapter 22 Summary
Linda wakes up extra early on the first day of tenth grade, hoping to catch Lily before she heads into school. On her way into town, she sets up a canoe on Gone Lake for them. She has a letter for Lily that she’d written as Mr. Grierson. Linda uses the memory of Leo and Patra in the hotel room to inspire her. She waits for Lily, but when she finally arrives, Linda notices her engorged belly and that she’s wearing the black boots. Linda doesn’t reach out to her.
The letter, in Mr. Grierson’s voice, tells Lily that he can’t stop thinking about what she said happened, so much that it now feels real to him. It accuses her of meaning to do that to him and graphically describes a sexual encounter between them. At the end, it asks: “Did you feel all that, Lily, you fucking pervert?” (274).
Throughout her life, Linda wonders what it would be like to have taken Lily out onto the lake. She fantasizes about Lily in the canoe, seeing the coldness take over her—the cold that Linda cannot feel. She imagines advancing on Lily, violence in her heart, and asking for a kiss. But, then, “like a curse or a wish,” Linda becomes Lily; she realizes that she’s the one alone and stranded, shivering. In her fantasy, she feels it all and is “the one wanted more than anyone else” (275).
Chapters 20-22 Analysis
Linda’s brief exploration of Christian Science reveals the reason behind Leo’s complacency over his son’s death; the religion doesn’t believe that humans are made of matter, and they don’t recognize the end of life. The chapter’s thrice repetition of “Heaven and Hell are ways of thinking” and “It’s not what you do but what you think that matters” centers the power of thought in the theme of religion. By placing power in the individual’s psyche, the religion also places the blame upon the person. Linda takes away that “changing how you see things” (249) is the only way to change her situation. However, she doesn’t implement this in her real life. In fact, the chapter demonstrates her complete lack of development into adulthood through her goodbye to Rom. Rom sees her for who she really is and wisely interprets the source of her trauma. Like Paul, Linda was “the easiest prey in the world” (253) to adults who let their children suffocate beneath the burden of beliefs. They were both “left behind” (253) for the sake of these very beliefs. Linda’s guilt over Paul’s death is represented through her preoccupation with Mr. Grierson; when she changes the phrase she’d been repeating, “It’s not what you think but what you do that matters” (255), she simultaneously absolves him of any guilt while condemning herself to a lifetime of self-punishment. Her realization that Mr. Grierson might have wanted to be caught represents Mr. Grierson’s desire for self-punishment and acknowledgement of his profound guilt, even if he never acted upon his desires. Mr. Grierson and Linda are set up as parallels precisely because of the complicated nature of their guilt; they are both guilty, yet not technically. The novel manufactures a study of the fine line between guilt and innocence through these two characters.
Chapter 21 employs the metaphor of the woods to represent change: each year, the woods constant changes “implied meanings half revealed, half withheld […] the woods covering and recovering its tracks” (258). Though the woods are exponentially changing, they are also constant—they are the only constant in Linda’s life. When she calls the woods “a kind of nursery” (259), she is expressing the role they played in raising her and offering her solace from her thoughts.
The chapter also reveals the full extent of Linda’s guilt in Paul’s death, as it describes the many chances she had in seeking help. When she goes out of her way to enter stores and buildings in hopes of seeing someone who might stop her and ask her what’s happening, she exposes her understanding of the dire situation and her desperation for help. However, she doesn’t quite have the tools to express her worry. When the opportunity arrives, she lets it pass out of fear of losing Patra and Paul. Linda describes her time with them as “everything worthwhile” (268) and demonstrates the way her isolated upbringing has made her vulnerable; once she’s found the warmth she’d always sought, she will risk anything to keep it. However, she loses it anyway and finds loneliness impossible to escape. This revelation indicates the deep imprint of trauma and emphasizes how attached Linda was to Paul and Patra—the pain of losing them never goes away.
Chapter 22 works best to elucidate how little Linda has grown at the end of the novel. In this way, Fridlund subverts the bildungsroman genre, refusing to end this coming of age tale with the character learning and growing from her trauma—instead, Linda is as ostracized as when the novel began, only angrier and more desperate for feeling, most concisely represented through her obsession—and hatred—for Lily. The anger and hurt she carries for the Gardners is misdirected toward Lily, someone she can reach. In blaming Lily, and then fantasizing about her, Linda shows that her trauma will remain undealt with. The graphic letter about the imagined encounter between a teacher and student, is assaulting. Linda crafts it to punish Lily for her lies, though Mr. Grierson is not entirely innocent. The final lines, though, demonstrate that part of her preoccupation with Lily derives from jealously; Lily is desired and gets away with her crimes, revealing that Linda’s greatest desire is to be seen, to be wanted, and to be pardoned.
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