It is the summer of 1952 and three men — well, one man and two boys — are on a spiritual and commercial mission. Dispatched from Minnesota to Western Ontario, they have been hired by an upstart Mormon baseball card company to find licensees for their products among the young men filing out Korean War–era rosters in the Northern League, at the bottom-most rung of professional baseball. What the Northern has for them, and the secrets and deceptions they have for each other, will drive their two weeks in Canada into ever-growing chaos.
In a vision of early 1950s Ontario that emphasizes accuracy but remains robustly anti-nostalgic and contemporary, the three businessmen have themselves an adventure of personal discovery, interpersonal hardship, and more than a little danger. With a world shaped by the trauma of World War II and the generations of deflated adults and orphaned children left behind by it, the story sets out on a clear-eyed and psychologically precise character study taking on grief, fantasy, adolescence, and family. As the narrator for this story of salesmen and ambitious athletes, 12-year-old Chris is a budding acerbic, able to be carried away by the — often empty — hopes of others and put his feet in the ground to stop them.
A novel concerned with sports, labor, growing up, and God, The Northern is a funny and heartbreaking book about the series of disappointments that characterize the progress of growing up.