"The Love Hunter" [1980] by Jon Hassler

This is my third Cafe go-around with a Jon Hassler novel, and what continues to amaze me to date is how the author can build so many varied stories around midlife male struggle enhanced by the cold and dreary setting of Rookery, Minnesota. Those works included The Dean’s List [1998], The Love Hunter, [1981], and North of Hope. [1990] True, our work at hand, The Love Hunter, does extend the plot’s unfolding into Manitoba, almost to the suburbs of Winnipeg. But the angst of Rookery hangs perpetually in the air wherever its characters go.
 
Of this sampling, The Love Hunter poses the most serious moral dilemmas for a cluster of three professionals approaching middle age. At its heart sits Rachel and Larry Quinn, married about seventeen years, and Larry’s best friend, Chris McKensie, whose alcoholic wife Karen had left him at least a decade before. Larry Quinn was steadily climbing the ladder at Rookery College, as I recall, as a professor of some note until he was stricken in his early forties with MS and unceremoniously fired from Rookery as his physical [and possibly mental] capacities deteriorated relentlessly. At the telling of the story here, Larry has about one year of projected life remaining.
 
He was fortunate to be married to Rachel, an energetic, enigmatic woman several years his younger. Rachel is inventing herself in local theater and beginning to attract notice for her productions. Still, she is Larry’s prime caregiver, and Hassler teases out the strain of multiple roles by giving us a look into her ambivalences. She loves her husband but at times acknowledges to herself, at least, that the Larry of ten years ago was an easier man to love. She throws herself into her multiple roles with gusto but at times wishes she could run away from everything. Larry’s disease had progressed into an angry depressive state of self-pity and anger. During one of her best plays, Larry explodes into a manic outburst in the audience.
 
Chris McKensie, for his part, has been a close friend of Larry’s from the time of their two marriages. He seemed to have less career focus than Larry, finally settling into the position of student counselor. One of the few consistencies in his recent life was his attraction to Rachel, and as Larry’s MS grows worse, Rachel is glad to have Chris join them for dinner most nights to distract or absorb Larry’s mournful diatribes. To say she shares a romantic vision with Chris is probably a stretch. To borrow a theatrical metaphor, she knows that Chris is in the wings, so to speak, but she keeps a certain reserve.
 
Chris, on the other hand, facing both the suffering of an old friend and the potential of winning the hand of Rachel, his widow, arrives at what he believes is the humane answer to this painful scenario. He will kill Larry, during a weekend hunting trip. I am not giving away the ending here—Hassler states Chris’s intentions in the first chapter. The narrative of the book is the alternating of past and present. I have to say that the idea of this cautious and nervous man undertaking such an audacious plan was more than a little surprising. As the book’s title suggests, the planned scene of the crime is a low-life hunting camp in Manitoba, a nine-hour drive from Rookery. Rachel packs lunches for the two duck hunters, but with Larry incontinent and reduced to the use of a walker, it is hard to imagine that the duo will cross the border back into the U.S. with many ducks.
 
The elongated climax of this book plays out in a tawdry hunters’ motel/dining room long past its prime, if it ever had one. The narrative of the first evening alone made me swear off ever eating duck. The dining room table was comprised mostly of blowhards consuming whiskey and half-cooked foul amidst much belching and burping [and worse]. Guests paid $30 daily for either [1] a guide through the swamp to shoot duck, or [2] the services of a woman indoors. Throw in mud, rain, rifles, and a drunken proprietor, and you have the makings of a madcap adventure where just about anything can happen…particularly to a crippled man in a decrepit boat surrounded by intoxicated men with loaded weapons.
 
Indeed, many things did happen as the weekend wore down, and I will let you explore the physical and psychological outcomes of this weekend at your own pleasure. Wikipedia comments that “Much of Hassler's fiction involves characters struggling with transitions in their lives or searching for a central purpose. Many of his major characters are Catholic (or lapsed Catholics), and his novels frequently explore the role small-town life plays in shaping or limiting human potential.” I included The Love Hunter in the Catechist Café’s exposition of Catholic novels precisely because of the moral complexities facing Chris, Larry, and Rachel. I had a professor in the seminary who told us that morality is not always about choosing good over evil. Rather, on occasion it is choosing a lesser evil over a greater evil.
 
The Catechist Café added this work of John Hassler to its recommended Catholic novels stream because it poses moral questions in the setting of excellent story-telling and novel weaving. And, if you enjoy this work, Hassler has written ten more, including North of Hope, which is centered on the struggles of a middle-aged priest.
 
 
The next book in the Café queue for review is Clericalism, just released April 7 and ready for me to review within two weeks or thereabouts.