Ice Palace by Edna Ferber

Later Baranof boasted that Chris Storm could pilot a float plane, drive a car, mush a team of nine huskies, paddle a skin boat, handle an outboard motor, cut up a seal with an ulu and mix the best sourdough pancakes in Baranof. Only this last accomplishment made her the envy of the town's more solid citizens. She had inherited her sourdough starter from Thor, who had originally come by it from a prospector on one of his Far North journeys. Melting, feather-light, delectable, the golden circlets were a more potent asset than all of Christine's more spectacular activities. She had shot a polar bear, helped pull in a beluga white whale, caught king salmon. She could knit and wear a sweater expertly. In her second and last Baranof college year Chris appeared at the final big dance in a slinky black strapless dress. The effect, with all that blondeur, was devastating.

Chris Storm is Alaska. She's the granddaughter of the two most notorious men in the city of Baranof, and probably the whole territory: Czar Kennedy, the business magnate responsible for the towering "Ice Palace," and Thor Storm, a Norwegian immigrant and newspaperman whose hardiness exemplifies the pioneer spirit. These men, with their opposing ideas of what Alaska should be, are long rivals, brought together by the romance of their children and the birth of Chris. As a result, Chris comes to represent both the pioneer spirit and the cutting edge of Alaska's future. She boasts that, as her mother was dying in childbirth, she was placed into the carcass of a caribou to keep warm--a real Alaskan birth.

Edna Ferber's Ice Palace was published in 1958, a year before the territory of Alaska earned its statehood. Territorial issues are at the heart of the novel: when it opens, a sinister business associate of Czar's is scheming to have his son Bay made governor of the territory, a position that might be a springboard to the role of Senator--from the state of Washington. Chris and Thor are believers that only statehood can fully guarantee independence and self-sufficiency for Alaska, which suffers from (as they see it) the importation of labor from "Outside." Ice Palace is familiar stuff for Ferber, who wrote similar books about the "larger-than-life" cultures of Texas, in Giant, and Oklahoma, in Cimarron. Ice Palace, in fact, might be read as a kind of update to Cimarron, about a pioneer territory hurtling toward full statehood, except it remains, for Alaska, still a future promise.

I'm OK with Ferber's own brand of pulp propaganda, but Ice Palace, unfortunately, stinks as a novel. It was Ferber's last book, and you can sort of see her narrative power leaving her behind. The novel spins and spins, setting up the competition between Thor and Czar, but never really figuring out what to do with either of them. Ferber insinuates over and over that Chris' "Alaskan-ness" promises her a role in the future of the territory--or state--but what that might be, the novel really has no idea. There's a suggestion that being Bay's wife is not enough for either Chris or Alaska, but the character remains all promise and no execution; it feels like Ferber spends the whole time setting up a novel that never really gets started.

The best part, I thought, was the visit to an "Eskimo" village on the Bering Sea, part of a months-long exploration of the territory that Thor wants to be a kind of education to Chris before she leaves to go to college "Outside." Chris is drawn to a handsome part-Inuit pilot named Ross, who offers a kind of alternative to Bay--a real Alaskan, rather than an imported power-grabber from Outside. Ferber's books all have a kind of "unwoke woke" quality to them, full of racial stereotypes but a larger message of American syncretism and cosmopolitanism, and the Inuit village is the only place where Ferber's image of Alaska feels really convincing. It's a site of tradition and continuity in a territory that's rapidly changing. Though Chris boasts of being born in a caribou, much of what Ferber spends her time doing is emphasizing how modern this Alaska is, how it has bowling alleys and cinemas and debutante balls and all the other stuff that makes it worthy of being American.