American by Day

"I think it’s a very clever thing to do. With Norwegian by Night , Miller basically transplanted an elderly American into the landscape of Norway, and through that lens was able to look at issues around immigration, issues around policing, issues around the Norwegian way of life through the eyes of somebody who was not part of that society. It’s not an uncomplicated viewpoint, because the main character in Norwegian by Night is suffering from Alzheimer’s. So you’ve got another layer of complexity woven in there. In the follow-up to it, he sent the Norwegian cop at the heart of Norwegian by Night , Sigrid Ødegård, to upstate New York to find her missing older brother Marcus, who is suspected of having murdered his African-American girlfriend by pushing her to her death. Sigrid teams up with the local sheriff, who is a sort of folksy good guy, a bit of an oddity, with surprisingly hip musical tastes and a master’s degree in divinity. So we have a classic uneasy partnership where each has to learn from the other. It’s complicated by the fact that Sigrid had shot a hostage-taker back in Norway, and that’s a very rare event in Norway. So American gun culture comes as quite a shock to her, although she learns pretty quickly how it works. Again, it uses the outsider’s point of view to talk about American society and the problems with American society. It deals with police brutality. It deals with race relations. Sigrid is a kind of oddity within that landscape. She reminded me a bit of Frances McDormand’s character in Fargo . Yes, and there’s a bit of her about Sigrid. So we get those odd, quirky, funny bits in between the serious stuff. There are some playful interactions with language as well – the banter between the cops sometimes becomes quite surreal, because Sigrid translates Norwegian sayings literally. One is something like, ‘It’s hard to ignore the moose sitting on your waffle.’ The American cop looks puzzled. She replies, ‘That might just not translate very well.’ So there are these little moments where the darkness is shot through with these cross-cultural miscommunications. And again, it’s about family, because Sigrid’s relationships with her father and her brother are woven through this novel. This book reminds me of the things that crime fiction can do when it works well. We don’t write about murders that happen in a vacuum. It’s about the intermarriage, the interweaving of crime and people, and the things that matter to them in their lives. “What we really talk about when we talk about crime fiction isn’t really murder” What we really talk about when we talk about crime fiction isn’t really murder. We’re talking about politics, we’re talking about race relations, we’re talking about family relationships, we’re talking about love, we’re talking about all sorts of things – driven by the engine of this violent death there in the wings, always, which pushes us forward. But, in many ways, that’s not the most important thing. American by Day is engagingly written. Miller isn’t afraid to write characters who are opinionated. They don’t hold their tongue about what they believe in, they let rip. People are angry, people are passionate. I love the unorthodoxy of it, I suppose. It’s not what you expect it to be. I don’t think you have to read it, but I think it gives an extra dimension to it because, in a sense, they’re mirror images of each other – looking at each other’s society through the eye of an outsider. And read Norwegian by Night anyway, because it’s a great read. I remember first reading that and thinking, ‘Oh, this guy can really write.’"