What I'm Going to Do, I Think by Larry Woiwode

First published: 1969

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1964

Locale: Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Pyramid Bluffs, Michigan (littoral northwestern Michigan); and Chicago, Illinois

Principal Characters:

• Christofer (Chris) Van Eenanam, the protagonist, a Wisconsin-born, twenty-three-year-old graduate student in mathematics, possessing animal good looks, who is physically fit but spiritually and psychologically anguished
• Ellen Sidone Anne Strohe Van Eenanam, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of the University of Wisconsin, with blonde hair and blue-green eyes, Chris’s wife (pregnant before marriage), who is much disturbed by the allegedly accidental death of her parents and by her propagandistic upbringing by her grandparents
• Aloysius James Strohe, Ellen’s wealthy, spry, shrewd, and devious grandfather, a former brewmaster and now the owner of his own brewery (producing Auld Meister beer)
• Grandma Strohe, Aloysius’s wife, thin, prim, old-fashioned, and manipulative, an almost fanatical Christian Scientist
• Orin Clausen, a farmer and the closest neighbor to the Strohes’ lakeside lodge, who is late-middle-aged, hardworking, stingy, sparing of speech, set in his ways, coarse, and prejudiced against Catholics
• Anna Clausen, Orin’s widowed sister-in-law, a zealous Lutheran, a partner in the farm work and finances, covertly generous and sympathetic; she is quiet, lonely, and acrimonious toward Orin

The Novel

Because the author’s emphasis is mainly on what happens within his characters, particularly within Chris and Ellen, the external action is compact, told partly through flashbacks and cyclical repetition of certain facts or incidents. Toward the end of his undergraduate days in Madison, Wisconsin, while at a party, Chris meets Ellen, whom he finds intelligent, disturbed, withdrawn, and deeply affecting. Beginning turbulently and evoking mixed feelings, the relationship continues for three years, including a one-year hiatus, which Ellen spends on her own in New York, partially influenced by her grandparents’ disapproval of Chris, whom they have met in the couple’s inspection visit at the Strohes’ labyrinthine seventeen-room villa in Milwaukee. At the end of this period, moved by what is still a mixture of not altogether consistent deep feelings and by Ellen’s premarital pregnancy, the couple decide to wed, call several churches in Madison, and finally convince a sympathetic young Presbyterian minister (who is not told about Ellen’s as yet undetectable condition) to perform a quick ceremony.

After a second, even more disastrous visit at Ellen’s grandparents’ place to break the matrimonial news, the couple honeymoon at the Strohes’ lodge in Michigan, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Most of the novel takes place there, as the couple continue to grapple with their innermost feelings and beliefs, each other, their new marital state, and their impending parenthood (including thoughts of abortion). Along with working hard to repair and restore the lodge and its grounds, the couple also explore their environs and learn about their closest neighbors, the Clausens—especially through Orin’s inconsiderate treatment of Chris in the extended, nightmarish account of the hay baling on the Clausens’ farm.

Toward the end of their stay at the lodge, while outside pursuing their separate activities, separately but simultaneously Chris and Ellen have a vision or premonition that they will have a son who dies at birth. In a brief one-page “coda,” this event is verified, the child’s death symbolizing the couple’s troubled beginnings and mixed feelings about the pregnancy, Chris’s ever-increasing psychological and spiritual anguish from lack of certainty about self and values, and his identity-suicide (revealed in the coda) in having given up the study of mathematics (a true aspiring of his spirit to attain the Ph.D.) to settle for an accounting job (earthbound and pedestrian).

The concluding epilogue recounts the couple’s return to the lodge seven years later, in 1971, for a month-long vacation, focusing on Chris’s flirtation with suicide by drowning in the lake; a tense moment when Chris seems to contemplate shooting Ellen’s ailing old dog, Winston, to end the latter’s misery; and the final emptying of his omnipresent .22 caliber rifle into a discarded plastic milk container—with one last, enigmatic shot fired out into the lake, probably symbolizing Chris’s frustrated outreach for attainment of self-knowledge, certainty, and self-satisfaction.

The Characters

Not only is this novel focused on the internal action of its characters (their thoughts, feelings, motivations) more than on external action, but it also is further focused or delimited to a small group of characters. This economy contrasts with many modern works of fiction that teem with individuals, including Woiwode’s own second novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album (1975), which introduces sixty-three characters by the end of the second of forty-four chapters. On the other hand, beyond the six principal characters of What I’m Going to Do, I Think, there are only a dozen or so more characters mentioned (some treated for only a few sentences) in its 309 pages.

This intentional narrowing of focus helps convey the intensity of the main characters’ inner lives as well as the contraction of their world. Chris and Ellen are continually doubting, thinking, worrying, and feeling about who they are, what they should believe, and what they should do next. Besides occasional forays into the world of nature at the lodge, their world is circumscribed—limited to each other (and to concern about the unborn child) and, too often, unfortunately, to themselves as individuals. The overwhelming atmosphere of the novel is one of unhappy isolation and solipsism.

At the same time, Woiwode vividly depicts characters by using exterior detail, though almost always in order to reveal personality. Ellen moves with a “sad sashay” (Chris’s repeated phrase) when sorrowful, suggesting her self-absorption and obliviousness to the outside world; Grandma Strohe habitually holds her elbows tight at her sides, suggesting her strictness and belief in self-containment; Grandfather Strohe’s appearance (“a stocky, heavy-jawed German with bright, bulging eyes and square patches of bristly eyebrows . . . totally bald”) suggests his combative nature, as does the meaning of his first name (literally, “famous in war”). The coarseness of personality and manner produced by rural or farm life is caught by the author’s description of Hank Olsen’s physiognomy (“a stocky, middle-aged wrestler-type, with small eyes, a broad nose with nostrils the size of dimes”) and of Orin Clausen’s actions (such as downing a whole thirty-two-ounce can of cherry juice and then, a little later, publicly urinating against the side of the barn).

The symbolism that so pervades the novel and its characterization, along with psychological analysis, is epitomized in the protagonist’s name; the oddity of his surname (though not its meaning) is explicitly referred to three times in the book. The significance of his first name (literally, “bearing Christ”) is strongly hinted in Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall by the Neumiller family patriarch’s giving his son the middle name Christopher because the latter was born on Christmas Day. Cristofer’s anxieties in What I’m Going to Do, I Think stem in part from the lapse of his Catholicism, with no certain core of beliefs and feelings and models of conduct to substitute in its place. Too often, because he is so ironically far from his namesake, he does harm to himself and Ellen.

Chris’s surname seems to be compounded from een (“one”) and naam (“name”) in Dutch—Chris twice, with a mixture of pride and embarrassed self-consciousness, mentions the tracing of his lineage back to a scribe of Peter Stuyvesant in Old New York. Ironically inverse to the unity or harmony embodied in his surname, Chris suffers from inconsistency and division. Though mostly discarding his Catholicism, he yearns for belief; though loving Ellen, at times he feels hatred or estrangement instead; though worried about finding his true self, he is always adolescently role-playing or disguising in Ellen’s presence, further multiplying false identities; though he has a destructive urge (seen frequently in his actions and alluded to in one of Ellen’s censures), he constructively and creatively restores much of the lodge; though ashamed of his rural parents and background, he prides himself on all his rural savvy (wherefrom many of his pragmatically constructive skills are derived); though tormented by, and tormenting Ellen for, Ellen’s year in New York (and her two brief affairs), Chris, on his bus trip from graduate school to his new wife’s hometown, makes sexual advances to a young coed, unconsummated only because of his drunken passing out.

Critical Context

What I’m Going to Do, I Think received the prestigious William Faulkner Award at the time of its publication, appeared on the best-seller list, and was translated into a number of languages. Woiwode’s second novel, the massive Beyond the Bedroom Wall, was also a critically acclaimed best-seller. His third novel, Poppa John (1981), failed commercially and received generally negative reviews; in time, however, that estimate may be revised. Woiwode has published many short stories, most of which have been excerpts from novels in progress; several of his stories have been included in collections of the year’s best. He has also published a volume of poetry, Even Tide (1977).

There is a particularly close connection between Woiwode’s first two novels. In many ways, the second novel carries on or elaborates motifs and concerns of the first: religion and especially Catholicism (as well as anti-Catholicism), the presence of the supernatural in visions or premonitions, parentage or parents and children (many more successes or near-successes occur in the second novel, in contrast to the failures in the first), the importance and influence of the past, and sensitivity to the natural environment (especially of the northern Midwest). Moreover, even particular incidents or characters are echoed or recognizably transmuted (indeed, a sly allusion to the first novel’s title is woven into chapter 8 of the second). For example, the horror of the stillbirth at the end of the first book is paralleled by Alpha Neumiller’s reaction to a preserved fetus used in a carnival sideshow in the second; Orin Clausen’s coarseness in urinating against the side of his barn is paralleled by Ed Jones’s writing his name in the dust with his stream (an apt symbol equating physical coarseness with his identity) while urinating out the backdoor of his house.

Unquestionably, Woiwode is important as a regional novelist focusing on the North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Illinois Midwest, and also as a writer among whose main interests are the role of religion (particularly Catholicism) and belief in twentieth century America.

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, as well as 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 (1975), 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 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 Woiwode’s homecoming and the effect it has had on his writing.