Ordinary Grace

One task Krueger sets Ordinary Grace with is capturing postwar life in the Midwestern small town. In 1961, New Bremen still retains the rose-colored glasses of 1950s, postwar optimism felt across much of the country. The impending counterculture of the 60s is largely absent; here, in rural Minnesota, we have a community that still doesn’t lock their doors, and where everyone seems to largely know everyone else.

There are multiple moments in the novel where characters gaze out from the bank of the river or the railroad trestle, toward the highway in the distance. Two takeaways from this repeated gaze are 1) the impending demise of towns on rail lines, and 2) the (also-impending) out-migration by many youths from communities like New Bremen.

While rail towns are what allowed much of the Upper Midwest and Great Plains to be as populatedby Anglos in the first place (with rail companies, the century prior, promising homes and land to especially German and Scandinavian families, who might find the climate less than foreboding), Eisenhower’s Interstate System would, in turn, spell the end of the livelihood of many of these towns, with highways—and interstate shipping—mitigating the worth of transport by rail. With new and faster routes, towns left off the path of the interstate system could only watch and recede.