Where You Come From Is Gone
Precise and vivid, Where You Come From Is Gone is a philosophical historical novel covering a rural family’s shifts to adapt to changing times.
The intricacies of a livelihood and rural Midwestern family dynamics are explored on a dramatic scale in Christopher Johnston’s riveting novel Where You Come From Is Gone.
Pete is one of four Brennan children, a working-class Minnesota clan involved in the commercial fishing industry and who run a mink ranching business. In 1960, the family business is thriving thanks to the oversight of Arthur, Pete’s father, whose nets reel in enough tullibee, walleye, and northern pike both to feed the mink in their sprawling ranch and to sell for profit. Pete has just returned home from the army to rejoin Arthur’s fishing operation when a horrible accident changes the course of his future.
Beyond Pete himself, the book covers his siblings’ issues: Wayne comes home from the Air Force with tattoos and a rebellious disposition; Lance chooses a life in “the Cities”; and Mary, a budding artist, forms a relationship with a local boy that exacerbates the long-standing feud between their families. Later, the focus shifts from Pete to his son, Jay, and the widening generational divide in the family. The familiar and the reliable are muddied as the twentieth century draws to a close.
As the family congregates during holidays and funerals, cozy scenes are backdropped by the encroaching political movements of the 1960s. The book continues to reflect similar shifts in social ideologies and formative cultural evolutions as the decades progress. State politicians zero in on commercial fishing norms in favor of the burgeoning sport-fishing and resort market, neutering the Brennans’ operation chunk by chunk; the proliferation of animal-rights movements threatens their mink harvesting business too.
Written with vivid attention to detail, the prose centers the indefatigable nature of change as the unwelcome harbinger of growing old. The Minnesota scenery, the minutiae of commercial fishing, and the brutality of harvesting mink are covered with unflappable precision. When the Brennans come to a crossroads about the future of their businesses and the complicated chemistry of their interfamily realities, the book takes on a timeless energy that forces deep introspection. As the way of life the Brennans forged slides into obsolescence, the complex relationships that the family’s brood experiences intensify, firing off the page in empathetic bursts.
Where You Come From Is Gone is an epic American novel about the eternal chasm between cosmopolitanism and subtle rural life.
Reviewed by
Ryan Prado
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