Beyond the Bedroom Wall by Larry Woiwode
"Beyond the Bedroom Wall" by Larry Woiwode is a sprawling and episodic family saga that intricately explores the lives of the Neumiller family from North Dakota, their ancestors, and their broader community. The narrative centers around Martin Neumiller, a deeply sensitive and devout son, whose life is marked by both accomplishments and a series of personal disappointments. While Martin's Catholic faith shapes his experiences and adds complexity to his aspirations, the novel delves into themes of family dynamics, the nuances of childhood, and the interplay between individual desires and familial expectations.
As the story unfolds, it shows Martin's struggles, including his professional challenges and the tragic loss of loved ones, particularly his first wife, Alpha. The narrative shifts focus to Martin’s children as they navigate their own paths, each character portrayed with unique quirks and depth, representing a rich tapestry of human experience. The novel's structure, while identified as an old-fashioned family history, also employs modernist techniques like varying points of view, ultimately contributing to its exploration of the cultural dichotomy between urban life and rural values. Recognized for its insights into Midwestern life and nominated for prestigious awards, "Beyond the Bedroom Wall" stands as a significant contribution to contemporary American literature, reflecting the human condition and the complexities of familial relationships.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall by Larry Woiwode
First published: 1975
Type of plot: Domestic chronicle
Time of work: From 1935 to the mid-1960’s
Locale: North Dakota, Illinois, and New York City
Principal Characters:
Charles Neumiller , a carpenter and the nominal head of the Neumiller familyMartin , the protagonist, Charles’s son, a teacher, plumber, insurance salesman, and, above all, fatherAlpha Jones , Martin’s first wifeCharles , an actor, the eldest son of Martin and AlphaJerome , a student doctor, the second son of Martin and AlphaTim , a teacher, the third son of Martin and AlphaMarie , the eldest daughter of Martin and AlphaSusan , the second daughter of Martin and AlphaLaura , Martin’s second wife
The Novel
A sprawling, episodic family history, Beyond the Bedroom Wall conveys with extraordinary fidelity and an enlightening sense of wonder the lives of ordinary people. It focuses on the Neumiller family, originally of North Dakota, but ranges over their extended families, their antecedents, and their communities. In doing so, the novel succeeds at times, without particularly attempting to, in surpassing the conventions of its genre. It attains an idiosyncratic, though nevertheless authentic, eminence as an anthropology of the affections.
The protagonist is Martin Neumiller, a sensitive, awkward, God-fearing son of the Midwest. Such story as the novel contains derives from him, his achievements, and his disappointments. The latter outnumber the former. Virtually all of his significant experiences take place within the rigid frame of the here and now. His failures and attainments, therefore, are no greater and no less than those of any ordinary man.
Martin has, however, one important, distinguishing feature: his Catholicism. His faith creates some problems as he attempts to establish his teaching career—predictably, given that he lives in North Dakota. Yet again, these difficulties are not given a decisive dramatic influence in the novel’s development. They are, like everything else in Martin’s world, part of the varied tapestry of which his life consists. Moreover, as though to compensate for professional frustration, Martin is able to marry Alpha, although she is not a Catholic and her family objects.
Martin is a firm believer in hard work, and in addition to his work at school, he takes on extra employment, restlessly attempting to satisfy himself by pursuing a dream of material adequacy for his growing family. As his family expands, and Martin is seen through the eyes of some of its members, it becomes clear that his restlessness is more illustrative of his nature than is his capacity for satisfaction. As though to confirm this view, Martin decides to move to Illinois—ostensibly to be near his father—just when circumstances seem to be about as good as they are going to get in North Dakota.
Life in Illinois begins disastrously and only slowly improves. By this time, however, it is Martin’s children—Charles, Jerome, and Tim, particularly—who command attention. In a strictly unsentimental manner, the novel succeeds in conveying all the moodiness, irrationality, and idiosyncrasy of childhood. Collisions between the different children’s private worlds are as lovingly recalled as are bouts of extemporaneous harmony. By keeping the small world of childish concerns to the fore here, the author is able to increase the shock value of adult problems when they intrude. Intrude they do: Alpha dies of uremia, Martin’s father dies, floods almost destroy everything, Martin remarries.
Eventually, the Neumiller children begin to go their different ways. Charles goes first and goes farthest—from the University of Illinois to New York City and, at length, a modest acting career. Much of Charles’s history away from the family deals with his sojourn in Greenwich Village and his encounters with various Bohemian types there. Charles’s experiences here are portrayed in the exhaustive detail characteristic of the novel. Yet whereas this approach brings the unfamiliar American heartland authentically to life, it succeeds merely in depicting the sterility of the metropolis. Charles himself recognizes this sterility only when he and his wife return to Illinois for the funeral of Martin’s second wife, Laura.
With this funeral, the novel ends. The family is both wounded and reunited. The novel has also come full circle, for its opening and most powerful sequence depicts Martin’s father, also named Charles, making a coffin and burying his father. Those two deaths are, in effect, the dark covers of the document referred to in the novel’s subtitle, “A Family Album.” Such a subtitle is an appropriately but unnecessarily modest indication of the celebration of the everyday enacted in Beyond the Bedroom Wall.
The Characters
Since Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a novel of condition rather than a novel of character, it contains very little sense of character development. In addition, Woiwode treats doing as a form of being. Therefore, the novel contains little investigation of motive, not very much introspection, and seems, in general, to be resistant to the concept of the psychological man. As though to make the resistance explicit, a feature of Charles’s alienated life as a newlywed in New York is that he is “deep in analysis.”
On the other hand, Woiwode also resists the depiction of his characters as stereotyped pillars of society. The characters’ personalities are too quirky and require too many outlets of expression to be pigeonholed: Variety and idiosyncrasy are their middle names, and it is one of the author’s most impressive achievements that the novel is too densely populated with clearly visible, diverting, and widely differing characters.
The Neumillers are the predominant representatives of character conceived as erratic, copious, and different. Martin is the model upon which his wife and family are based. In his longings, his impatience, his kindness, and his energy, he embodies a wonderful zest for life, without in any sense being presented as a superman or even as a conventional hero. Martin is all the more impressive because he has little awareness of, or interest in, his own uniqueness. Moreover, his distinctiveness is most readily appreciated by observing what he does, and how he responds, rather than what he thinks.
A paradoxical feature of Martin’s character is that it never amounts to anything definitive. Despite his energy and capacity for involvement and thoroughness, the world seems to resist his best efforts. His authenticity is measured most accurately in terms of his failures. His stature is most clearly visible in his ability to sustain loss. It may be that, as Martin remarks, “A man should be grateful for what he gets and not expect to get one thing more.” Yet his appeal lies in the fact that his experience, in effect, restates that sentiment as a question rather than as an assertion.
Martin is a dominant influence on the novel’s sense of character, but the author allows Alpha and Tim as well to make their own distinctive contributions to the narrative: Alpha’s takes the form of a diary covering her courtship and the early years of her marriage, while Tim documents his childhood in a first-person narrative. Both of these resources, however, are used intermittently and arbitrarily.
In addition, Martin disappears at times while the author constructs a community in which the family can live. The community is constructed by means of a series of thumbnail sketches of its citizens, a procedure which, because of repetition, comes to have a weary air of obligation about it. For all the fascinating peripheral characters which the novel contains, notably the members of Alpha’s family, Martin looms over all, an archetype of adequacy.
Critical Context
Although Beyond the Bedroom Wall uses some modernist technical devices, largely in varying point of view, it is essentially an old-fashioned family history. In fact, it might seem to owe its artistic lineage to more primitive sources such as the saga, or as the quotations at the beginning from an early traveler’s account of the Dakotas suggest, the voyage-narrative. As such, it suffers from some artistic limitations. The author overindulges his powers of recall. Apart from death and threatened death, the novel lacks dramatic incident. It is too diffuse.
Nevertheless, it is the best of the author’s three novels. Nominated for a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, it enjoyed both a critical and commercial success. Moreover, it is a significant landmark in an important struggle which continues to characterize a recent important trend in American fiction.
This struggle is between the city and the soil, between metropolitan styles and rural values, between individual freedom and family obligations. Beyond the Bedroom Wall not only reflects such cultural tensions but also attempts to articulate their sources and their human urgency. Despite its technical deficiencies, therefore, this novel goes beyond being an admirable act of homage to everyday life. It is also an important chapter in the sociology of the contemporary American novel and a meditation on the culture of Middle America in mid-century.
Bibliography
Nelson, Shirley. “Stewards of the Imagination: Ron Hansen, Larry Woiwode, and Sue Miller.” Christian Century 112 (January 25, 1995): 82-85. Nelson interviews Hansen, Woiwode, and Miller, focusing on the role of religion in their works and on readers’ reactions to their novels.
Scheick, William J. “Memory in Larry Woiwode’s Novels.” North Dakota Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1985): 29-40. Scheick discusses the importance of memory in three of Woiwode’s novels, What I’m Going to Do, I Think (1969), Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and Poppa John (1981). He identifies two types of memories, those that make a character feel guilt and long for death and those that develop a sense of connection to one’s family. The ability to order these allows Woiwode’s characters to achieve a balance between them.
Woiwode, Larry. “Homeplace, Heaven, or Hell.” Renascence 44 (1991): 3-16. Woiwode discusses the problem of being considered merely a regional writer because he writes about the Midwest. He says that all writers must write about some place and that only geographical chauvinism makes one place better than another. The author also asserts that the main duty of a Christian writer is to write the truth, which means to write about a place in precise detail.
Woiwode, Larry. “Where the Buffalo Roam: An Interview with Larry Woiwode.” Interview by Rick Watson. North Dakota Quarterly 63 (Fall, 1996): 154-166. A revealing interview about Woidwode’s homecoming and the effect it has had on his writing.