"Shelter half" is army lingo, the name given to pup tents used by infantry soldiers.  Each man carries one half of a tent, so that come nightfall he needs literally to connect with a buddy, to link their two halves into a single shelter for the both of them.  It's a device both practical and symbolic, and probably that's why Minnesota writer Carol Bly picked the phrase to serve as title for her fine novel, published posthumously last year.



   The story opens with a murder, but that's only a red herring to get things moving:  we never learn much about the victim or murderer.   A second killing occurs later on in the story with much greater impact, but even this event passes by with only minimal comment.   Bly's real interest lies in capturing and identifying the various specimens of good and evil that mark  the residents of a small town in northern Minnesota.  Both saintliness and deparvity come in multiple different shades and hues, she shows us,  and she also traces brilliantly how some characters can (or can't) move from one moral state to another. 



   To develop her fictional world, Bly carries out a striking formal experiment.  The first thirteen chapters (out of fifteen total) are each narrated through the perspective of a different character.  As I write these words, it suddenly occurs to me (duh!) how much this recalls Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.  It's a remarkably democratic form, with seemingly minor and major figures all given equal weight, and of course it recalls the central metaphor:  you have to link the pieces together to understand the shelters the characters build in their everyday lives.



   To be honest, the structure was a bit off-putting at first.   I'd meet one character, get interested in his or her life, only to have that person disappear with the start of the next chapter.  I gradually got hooked, though, so involved in the lives of these people that I didn't feel cheated when the book ended without tying up many of its plot threads--there's an open-endedness here akin to the way Natsume Soseki liked to close his novels a hundred years ago.



   Bly was a fixture in the Minnesota writing scene for decades with her short stories and essays, but Shelter Half was her first novel.  It's a shame she didn't live to see its publication, but the work stands as a fine legacy, a powerful example of what John Gardner celebrated as "moral fiction."



    Any other good books out there I should be reading?   Do tell.