Regional & Unique

THIS IS THE YEAR (623 pp.)--Feike Feikema--Doubleday ($3).

In this novel, 18 years of life on an Iowa farm are itemized with raw fidelity and strapping lyricism. Subtitled "a novel of faith in the earth," it is also a novel of bitterness over the gutting and misuse of the earth by first-and second-generation U.S. settlers. The theme is large, simple and an incitement to soil conservation. At times the treatment has an earthy swell and eloquence. But Author Feikema works his lesson so hard that before readers reach the end of the book, they will be worn out.

The relationship between the prairie land and the men who exhausted it is symbolized by the life of redheaded Pier Frixen and his wife, Nertha. Pier took over his father's farm in 1918. But he quarreled with the old man about marrying silver-blonde Nertha, who was half Norwegian. His father wanted Pier to marry a Frisian girl. "Soan, dy faem is net goed genoch [Son, that maiden is not good enough]," he said. Pier raged at the old man's nonsense about Ald Fryslan on the North Sea shore. So his father went out to brood, looking across the valley at the Hills of the Lord which he had first seen in 1869.

"By a river in the Siouxland he stood weeping. He was cast forth by his soan. He was but a dog in the eyes of his soan. Lonesome he was for old carnival times, for the merke [a fair], for wild music . . . and wild fammen [maidens]. Lonesome he was for It Aide Lan [the old country] where canals were sweet with water lilies, where storks built nests on high."

That old country was utterly unlike the prairie farm--a farm so big that the old man had never learned to work it. But his big son, Pier, putting all his strength into the job, got rid of the mortgage that first bumper year. And Nertha bore him a boy. Pier bought a 1919 Buick. He was so sure of himself that he laughed at the county agent who wanted him to try contour plowing. Nertha coaxed him to learn how to read and write, but Pier cared more about breeding heifers.

As the deep winters and stormy summers passed, the loess (heavy deposit of windblown dust) gradually washed and gullied away. Nertha, too, changed. She suffered Pier and worked for him. At last she became barren, apathetic, shrewish. When Teo, their little boy, was six, he was already doing a man's work. But despite Teo's help, Pier had to mortgage the farm again. Pier was hardworking and resourceful, but he was also bullheaded. In the early '303, he refused to join his neighbors in the New Deal's corn and hog program. In 1936, the great dust storms ruined him. ("Fool. Such a fool. Man assumes that the soil is eternal. It is not. . . ."). Neglected and sick for years, Nertha died.

Much of the book's flavor is due to the presence of the old people with their Frisian speech (which is close to the Anglo-Saxon), their memories and legends of old Friesland. The story is told almost season by season, chore by chore. Author Feikema excels in descriptions of plowing, cultivating, reaping, threshing. Sometimes sensitively, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes with embarrassing rhetoric he has written a unique regional novel.

Farm-grown Feike Feikema, now in his early 305, stands 6 ft. 9 and is one of six brothers. He wrote this novel on two Regional Writing Fellowships granted by the University of Minnesota. Both Sinclair Lewis and Van Wyck Brooks saw it before publication, liked it, and allowed the publisher to say so.

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