Love in a Cold Climate

LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME

By Vendela Vida

Ecco. 226 pp. $23.95

Vendela Vida has borrowed the title of her second novel from a poem by Marry Somby, a member of one of Europe's largest indigenous groups, the Sami, who settled in Lapland more than 4,000 years ago.

Populating the northern regions of the Scandinavian peninsula from Norway to Russia, the Sami speak 10 languages that include about 400 words for reindeer (their traditional livelihood) and one word that has found its way into English: "tundra."

Vida's novel has adopted not just the remarkable title and milieu of Somby's poem but also its emotional urgency. Part prayer, part curse, her book is a tightly restrained expression of anger and yearning, a strangled cri de coeur. Across its surface runs a frozen stream of bleak comedy, while tragedy churns underneath. In this case, Vida has aptly located her tragedy of parental abandonment in the most remote, unforgiving landscapes of Finland and Norway.

Clarissa Iverton, the novel's American narrator, has weathered a difficult childhood with reasonable grace. She's an ungrudging guardian of her younger brother Jeremy, who was born with a severe case of Down syndrome. More difficult but still manageable has been the absence of her mother, who vanished from the mall near their house in Rhinebeck, N.Y., while Christmas shopping, leaving only this message for her 14-year-old daughter at the bakery where they were to meet: "She said to tell you she got tired of waiting." Now 28, Clarissa is engaged to her childhood friend Pankaj, a doctoral student in philosophy, and edits film subtitles in Manhattan for a living. After her father dies of a sudden heart attack, she sifts through his papers and discovers that her real father is not the man who raised her but a complete stranger, a Sami priest living in Lapland.

Worse than this revelation is the news that Pankaj, whose mother was Clarissa's mother's best friend, has known the secret for 15 years. Stunned by these betrayals, Clarissa does what the women in her family do best. "No one knew I was going anywhere. Disappearing is nothing. I learned this from my mother."

When Clarissa travels to the Arctic Circle to confront her father, any reader hoping for a fact-stuffed travelogue is bound to be disappointed. As in Vida's first novel, "And Now You Can Go" (2003), in which a traumatized young woman escapes to the Philippines to help American doctors on a mercy mission, the new book stays faithful to its distraught narrator's point of view, providing only eccentric glimpses of its exotic locale. Instead of straightforward description, we're offered disconnected sensual details. During a forlorn sexual misadventure with a shuttle-bus driver in Helsinki, Clarissa notes that the man's fingers "tasted like coins."

Much later, sick with fever in the remote Norwegian town of Kautokeino, Clarissa drinks reindeer blood, offered by a healer, that "tastes like electricity." A reindeer herder who befriends her "smelled like a hamster I used to own," and her traveling clothes have "the plane smell of Band-Aids." Hitching a ride from Kautokeino to Karasjok, where Clarissa hopes the newly built Sami parliament might divulge clues about her parents' history, she sees a white plastic chair hanging from a tree, about which she and the couple who picked her up "laughed together for longer than we needed to."

Clarissa's mirth in this unfunny moment comes from desperation, but she's not immune to more subtly amusing encounters with reticent Laplanders. During her first meeting in Finland with Eero, the Sami priest whose name appears on her birth certificate, he shows off his neighborhood, in which every house but one displays a single strand of white Christmas lights. "Everyone is VERY upset with that house," Eero tells her, pointing to the one house with blue lights around its front door. "Those people really took it too far."

These offbeat impressions are merely distractions from an increasingly painful journey. It turns out that Eero is not Clarissa's biological father and that the parent she finally tracks down in Lapland is her mother, who is working as a guide for adventure tours at an ice hotel in Norway.

The reunion between Clarissa and her mother is far from heartwarming. Here, the book's parallels between frigid northern landmarks and chilly human behavior begin to seem too tidy. We're asked to believe that this mother, whom Clarissa has repeatedly described as charismatic, gives off brilliance but no warmth, like the hotel made of ice or the Northern Lights, which the Sami believe are their ancestors.

Yet we never see any evidence of that charisma: When Clarissa confronts her mother, she is unrelentingly ugly and cruel. In the end, a novel whose theme is emotional withholding becomes a perpetrator of its own crime, making the reader yearn, like an unloved daughter, for more.