Ideas, adventure and comedy in "Expeditions"

"The Expeditions" by Karl Iagnemma

Dial, 322 pp., $24

Writer-roboticist (yes, that's right) Karl Iagnemma made a big splash with his 2003 debut collection of short stories, "On the Nature of Human Interaction," a book that had a foot in two dissimilar worlds: contemporary academia and 19th-century Northern Michigan.

Iagnemma clearly knew his stuff when it came to campus rivalries and research obsessions. (As a research scientist at M.I.T., he's part of a team working on the next Mars rover.) But it was the book's historical tales that tapped something deeper in him.

Now in his first novel, "The Expeditions," he evokes 1844 Detroit and Michigan's upper peninsula on a symphonic scale. The results are flat-out wonderful.

Iagnemma, who grew up in suburban Detroit, is fascinated with the period when the city lay near the old "Northwest" frontier of the United States. And his evocation of the coves, bluffs and woods of the peninsula's Lake Superior coastline is IMAX-intense.

But there's more to "The Expeditions" than good period detail and swell scenery. This book is a novel of ideas, an outdoor adventure story, a comedy of fraud and errors — and Iagnemma knows exactly what he's doing on every count.

Two gradually merging narratives form the backbone of the book. In the first, we meet 16-year-old Elisha Stone, a runaway from a small New England town who lands in Detroit, where he signs up for an expedition investigating the natural resources of the upper peninsula. For the first time in three years, he sends word to his mother of where he is.

What he doesn't know is that she's dead — and that his ailing clergyman father, the Rev. Stone, has set out to Michigan to tell his son of her demise.

The Rev. Stone, who has "a queer conviction that he [can] see the color of other people's souls," is sustained on his trouble-plagued journey by frequent consumption of McTeague's Patent Toothache Medication.

What keeps Elisha going? His youth, innocence, curiosity and ambition. He'd like to be a scientist, and he's meticulous about sketching and writing up his observations as he heads into former Chippewa territory, recently acquired by the U.S. But as he starts to comprehend the characters of the expedition's co-leaders, he realizes he's in for a rough ride.

Mr. Silas A. Brush and professor George D. Tiffin, his bosses, are a study in contrasts. Brush's interest in the peninsula is strictly in what wealth its resources have to offer. Tiffin is on a grander quest — to prove that all the races are equal ... by finding "proof" that the Chippewas are a lost Jewish tribe of the Bible.

There's a personal motive behind Tiffin's obsession, and hints that his research may depend more on imagination than empirical fact. "Facts," he tells Elisha, "are like rocks. They are dead. Ideas are like trees. They possess the ability to grow. Facts are useless except in service of an idea."

The wild card in this traveling party is Susette Morel, the men's half-Chippewa guide who fills in at the last moment when her husband fails to show. Elisha is soon smitten with her. Brush and Tiffin alternate between praising her and bad-mouthing her. Like the landscape they're traversing, Susette becomes a focal point for their dreams, imaginings, projections, delusions.

In the meantime, the Rev. Stone, chasing after his son, struggles with some medication-enhanced dreams, delusions and hazards of his own.

Iagnemma is a born writer the way some musicians are born concert prodigies. He's attuned to the poetry of specialist vocabularies ("hornblende and sandstone and graywacke slate") and to the mysteries of our surroundings ("It was as difficult to understand a lump of dirt," Elisha reflects, "as it was another human being").

"The Expeditions" is astute in tracing the murky boundary between observation and interpretation — especially when a researcher comes at his subject with an agenda. This is a father-and-son story, too, handled to great effect, without slipping into sentimentality.

With its rich characterizations, its lively action, its supple thought and its fine, rhythmic prose, this book is a pleasure from cover to cover.