62 pages • 2 hours read
Emily FridlundHistory of Wolves
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
The cabin is much darker than usual when Linda walks in. She finds Leo in a chair with Paul wrapped in a quilt in his lap, looking so much younger than usual. The cat scurries off, and Linda notices that “the room fell into a hush” (115) from Leo’s influence. Patra moves quietly and timidly, unnerving Linda a bit. Linda asks if Paul is still ill, but soon learns that “this was a question [she] was not allowed to ask” (116); Leo frowns, and Paul instinctively mimics his father; Patra touches Linda with a gentle warning. The three of them are taking a trip to Duluth to watch “the tall ships” (117).
Later, as Linda prepares for “the trial,” someone asks why she didn’t ask more questions, what she thought of Leo, and what he and Patra were like as parents. She didn’t question them at the time because they had been so kind to her.
While in the house, Linda notices a strange, sickly sweet new smell to it. Leo attempts to make small talk with Linda, and she thinks of how the prosecution asks why she didn’t ask questions in return; she replies that she observed them in other ways, taking in the strange ways he moved through the house. Leo invites her to join them in Duluth.
Linda leaves to find the dogs gone, to her surprise. When she arrives home, her mom is irritated at her for losing control of the dogs. Leo and Patra pick her up early the next day. Paul sleeps in the back for most of the ride until they stop for lunch. At lunch, Linda is self-conscious of her table manners and orders soup because it is less intimidating. She is highly aware of all the other families at the restaurant. Leo questions her about her academic interests, correcting her interest in “the history of wolves” as “natural history” (125). He asks he what she thinks she knows, but Linda only thinks of the land she grew up on.
In Duluth, Linda takes Paul on a walk, beginning to grow concerned over his pallor and sleepiness. Though he says he’s okay, Linda notices the “fruity, sweet” smell of his breath (129). They eat room service while Leo and Patra go out to dinner. When they return late in the night, Linda creeps out of bed to watch them from the bathroom. She finds Leo sitting up in bed and Patra on her knees. The image makes her think of Mr. Grierson and Lily, the two couples morphing into one. Patra tells Leo to relax, to “[s]top being a baby” (132).
At Mr. Grierson’s trial, Lily testifies that nothing ever happened between them. Mr. Grierson testifies that he is ashamed of his thoughts—that he never touched Lily but thought about it and much worse.
The next morning, Linda wakes to find Patra and Paul gone. Concerned, she asks Leo, but he only questions her about her belief in God, wondering what her “premises of self” are (133). When Linda avoids his questions, Leo says that he knows she is lonely, and that can make “a person, a young woman, clingy” (135). He tells her that she is not really lonely and angers Linda. She lashes out, repeating Patra’s words from last night. Flustered, Leo jumps up and urges them to set to meet Patra and Paul. Linda feels reassured to find the two of them safe.
Chapter 11 Summary
As they watch the ships move through the harbor, Linda realizes that Leo is “a tyrant for facts” (139) making every moment a lesson and bearing down on Paul about details. Linda had taken Patra’s headband from the bathroom and worn it in hopes that she would notice, but Patra only pays attention to Leo. She is so focused on him, that they both don’t notice Paul throwing up into the grass until a stranger walks over with napkins.
They leave Duluth in a rush. Linda, Patra and Paul wait in the car while Leo settles the hotel bill. There, Linda realizes how much she dislikes the version of Patra around Leo: “[A]ll her gestures were stretched out of size with a touch of performance” (145). Hoping to hurt her, she asks about how they met. After explaining that it was her, the student, who chased him, the teacher, Patra reveals that Leo is “a third-generation Christian Scientist” (147). Leo’s return interrupts their discussion, Patra is too distracted to continue.
The drive home is slow, but Linda is hesitant to part, slowly grabbing her bag when Leo drives up to her land. Later, “they” would say that she must have “sense something was off” (150), but Linda remembers how everything had seem so normal at the time—that she wasn’t the type of person to see things in that way. Once home, she is agitated by being there and the presence of her mother, who she ignores and climbs into bed. The sounds around her and the pounding in her head keep Linda up the whole night.
Paul dies of cerebral edema: a swelling in the brain that presses into the skull and optic nerves” and he had “a funny sweet taste in the back of his throat” (142) from his diabetic ketoacidosis. Linda later learns that he’d probably been sick for weeks; that his parents would make pancakes and tidy up the house instead of taking him to the hospital.
Chapter 12 Summary
Chapter 12 is the first chapter of the second section of the book: “Health.” Linda recalls how her mother used to call her a CEO because of her obsession with counting—with taking inventory of her surroundings. She remembers how cramped their cabin always was, how it felt even tinier during the winter because they’d huddle around the stove. Details like these always fascinated others in her life: “They calculate their own strengths against it, unconsciously, preparing to pity or fight you” (157).
Linda’s mother always struggled to understand her. She wanted her to be playful and imaginative, but Linda was always practical and serious. She’d urge Linda to pretend, and sometimes Linda would attempt to placate her by wearing a dragon tail when taking the dogs out or putting a tennis ball in her mouth like a dog. Her mother wants her to “be a regular little kid for one second” (168), but Linda doesn’t know how to be anything else.
The mechanic Linda dates in her twenties confronts her through a tarot reading, asking her what she thinks of the Fool card. Linda says the Fool “looks like pretty easy prey” (158), prompting him to ask who she saw as prey in her childhood. Linda attempts to pivot by calling herself a “wolf expert,” but the mechanic urges her to consider who, then, was the prey.
The mechanic, Rom, describes the Fool as a traveler “walking off a precipice,” but reasons that “it’s not all bad to let yourself fall” (169). Linda realizes Rom has painted her as the fool; for, the fool is a guilty traveler, never staying in one place. She rises to leave, feeling defensive. Rom describes the Fool as a Peter Pan, telling Linda that her past is the same as her future.
The night she returns from the trip to Duluth, Linda is feeling restless and reckless. She sneaks out into the night, climbs in the canoe, and glides out onto the water.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Linda’s observation that the cabin appears visibly darkened marks a stark tonal shift in the novel at the beginning of Chapter 10. The mystery of Leo is beginning to unfold; the way the rest of the house falls into silence around him is indicative of his power. Patra is the most changed, moving delicately throughout the house as though afraid to upset or disturb her husband. The motif of illness intertwines with the theme of observation in this chapter, beginning with Linda’s realization that she is not to comment upon Paul’s health, despite its obvious decline. As Linda reflects back on these events from beyond the trial, she offers major characterization which explains why she couldn’t intervene earlier; she “takes in information differently” by pretending to understand “what was happening in other people’s lives before explanations were offered” (118). In an effort to appear knowledgeable and fit in, Linda often remains quiet and emotionless toward her surroundings—any suspicions she had of Leo were misdirected into pretending to already understand him; she knows he is off—dangerous even—but does not push any further.
As Linda interacts with Leo, the novel stresses the importance of knowledge and its relationship to power. Leo, as an accomplished academic and tends to control the flow of conversation. However, his concept of knowledge differs from Linda; while he questions her knowledge of science, Linda’s understanding of the world lies in the world itself, in nature. In many ways, she understands more than Leo, but his pretension keeps him from seeing that. However, Linda can be extremely naïve, exhibited through her curiosity toward Leo and Patra’s sexual relationship. She interprets it by linking it to Mr. Grierson and Lily, underscoring the significant imprint the rumor of Lily and Mr. Grierson left upon Linda’s psyche. The revelation that Lily did in fact lie about her relationship with Mr. Grierson is eclipsed by his admission that he’d thought about it, many, many times. Therefore, the novel posits a philosophical dilemma for the reader: Does thinking make it so?
Chapter 11 develops the motif of sickness and death by beginning to unravel the events that lead to Paul’s death: his illness and his parents’ neglect. Leo’s polite, unshaken response to the stranger pointing out how sick Paul is foreshadows the role he plays in his son’s death. When Patra reveals that Leo is a Christian Scientist, a sect of Christianity in which a major tenet is the belief that illness is an illusion that can only be combatted with prayer, it explains the tension Leo emitted when Linda commented about Paul’s health. Leo’s powerful influence over Patra, though, is more telling of his danger to his family; when a friend tells Patra “there’s something unsettling” about Leo, Patra misinterprets it, agreeing that he’s “unsettlingly smart” (146). Even early in the relationship, Patra can only see Leo through rose colored glasses. Most importantly, Chapter 11 is the end of the “Science” half of the novel, which emphasizes biology, astronomy, and natural history in relation to the novel’s themes of observation, religion, and growing up. It explores these respective themes through a scientific lens, obscuring the emotional elements of the novel with factual explanations.
Chapter 12, the beginning of the “Health” section, first undermines the literary tradition’s relationship to poverty; Linda describes her family huddling around a furnace for warmth, admitting that it has “a certain romance […] if you tell the story right, a certain Victorian ghost-story earnestness people like” (157). Fridlund’s poignant observation that listeners—and readers—are drawn to Dickensian tales of woe presents the preference as voyeuristic. Linda knows her painful story makes her interesting to others. Rom, the mechanic Linda dates in here twenties, touches upon this, recognizing that Linda struggles to connect with others because of the trauma in her past. As he pushes her on who she saw “as easy prey in [her] childhood” (158), the novel refocuses on the predator/prey dynamic explored through Linda’s preoccupation with wolves; though she relentlessly emphasizes her knowledge of wolves, the tarot cards read her as easy prey. The scene, because it is so close in the text to Paul’s death, echoes Linda’s initial interpretation of Paul as prey-like. Rom’s analysis of Linda appears between Linda’s memories of her mother constantly pressuring her to be someone else, demonstrating Linda’s immovable character, that she cannot be anything else than what she is, despite how hard she tries to be something else.
