Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
It was a lifetime ago that cousin Tom Murray and I grew up in Storm Lake, Iowa, during those halcyon years of the late 1950s and 60s. Tom’s Dad, Coach John Murray, was a teacher and coach with St. Mary’s High School, 1954 through 1967, and positively influenced a generation of students and families during his long and significant tenure.
It must have been fertile ground for creation of aspiring writers as brother Art and cousin Tom have published books released this past fall, Art’s nonfiction, “Dear Marty We Crapped in Our Nest” (Ice Cube Press), and Tom’s fiction, “The Empty Set” (Full Court Press). I enjoyed reading both, and I’d like to take a look at “The Empty Set.”
“The Empty Set” is the second in Murray’s Iowa Trilogy, bridging generations of heartbreak and triumph in small town Iowa by exploring the crossings of time, belonging, legacy, death, and what comes next.
The first novel, “Fathers, Sons, and Holy Ghosts of Baseball,” described a story of a high school baseball season in 1974 with inimitable characters young and old.
Murray’s second novel, “The Empty Set,” takes place in 2018, and is the first-person narrative of teenaged Michael Moriarity. Michael tells his story of living in three worlds, an Asian American with Laos and Irish heritage and Irish surname, a connection with his Hmong culture with friend Pa Dao’s intervention, and Black friend, Harden’s gravity pull toward him and Harden’s basketball friends.
Michael, his older brother, John, and father Pat (Puff) Moriarity, continue the tradition of listening to a nightly baseball game as the Moriaritys are solid Minnesota Twins fans with a particular devotion to star Joe Mauer. Puff says of him, “a protector from the earth when hope is lost.” Mauer is a star in any sport but especially baseball. Mauer models when to hold on and when to let go of a Hall of Fame career during Moriarity’s personal narrative.
The Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, said, “All great literature is one of two stories, a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” And that is apt in this storytelling.
The Moriarity family leave the “quiet sameness” of fictional Cottage Park, Iowa, to start over in the turbulence of the Northside of Minneapolis – ground zero for some of our nation’s most severe societal and educational achievement gaps.
Michael’s guides for navigating Northside are classmate and fellow hooper, Jerome Vaughn (Harden) and his teammate friends, and Pa Dao Xiong, a rising young Laos-Hmong shaman who has been summoned by Michael’s deceased mother, Mai Vang, to explain Hmong cultural practices to Michael.
Life on the Northside at times balances on a razor’s edge between conflict and connection, and death and salvation. That balance is the question for Michael, will he know when to hold on and when to let go?
The characters of “The Empty Set” answer that question in this ambitious and compelling novel that the reader will find enriching.
Bill Cullen, now living in Dubuque, Iowa, is a brother of the editor and a cousin of Tom Murray, who was nearly a sibling when we were growing up in Storm Lake, Iowa. Murray now lives in a Twin Cities suburb north of St. Paul, Minn.
