Professor of English Scott Nadelson released his ninth novel on Sep. 4. “Trust Me” is a story about a father and daughter and the weekends they spend together in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. It is here that main character Lewis Nelson lives, in the cabin he bought as a last failed attempt to save his marriage. The idyllic area, described in the novel for its lush ferns and clear waters, is inspired by the Little North Fork River just east of Salem — a place dear to Nadelson’s own heart.
The first chapter follows the subdued scramble to find lost keys and get to school on time as another weekend together comes to an end. It will be five days before Skye, Lewis’ daughter, gets to come back to her father. Between the insecurity of a divorced father and the angst of a young tween is a deep emotionality, equal parts profound and mundane.
“Writing some of the just ordinary moments and trusting that was the hardest part,” Nadelson shared. “[The book] follows a year in their lives, revisiting them every weekend. So, there are 52 chapters, one for each weekend.” The chapters are short; eight pages at their longest and three at their shortest. “Each chapter is kind of its own little mini short story,” Nadelson said. “That felt right to me.”
“I’m a short story writer at heart, in part because I feel like my experience in the world fits in [that] form more easily. My life is not novelistic, and imposing a novelistic plot onto the characters I’m interested in usually feels very artificial. I have a really sensitive BS meter.” He admitted, “It’s a very plotless book in a lot of ways.”
Nadelson cited Finnish author Tove Jansson and her novel “The Summer Book” as an inspiration: “Most of my work, and this is similar, starts with me being in conversation with other books that I love and other writers I admire. … What [Jansson] does in that book is really beautiful.” “The Summer Book” follows a grandmother and granddaughter and their summer together on a little island in the Finnish sea, which “kinda feels like all summers in a way,” as Nadeson put it. “And so I was thinking, I mean, I don’t have an island in the Finnish sea, but what’s my magical place?”
“I spent a lot of time in the foothills of the Cascades here and on that river. My kiddo was about 4 years old,” he said, recalling the book’s inception. “Part of it was me projecting forward and imagining what it was gonna be like when they were [a] preteen [or] teenager, and imagining that relationship many years forward. That was the starting place.” It’s a book just as much about a father and daughter as it is about the place they share. In Nadelson’s own words, “It’s about the three of them. It's like a kind of a love triangle.”
It was partly this magical aimlessness that saw Nadelson abandoning the project, then returning to it, then abandoning it again over eight years of writing. Then came the fall of 2020, when Oregon’s Labor Day fires burned to the ground that place that had served as an inspiration for Nadelson. “I finally had a breakthrough after the fires,” he recounted. “[It] unfortunately gave me a direction where the book had been maybe inevitably going all along. It wasn't where I wanted it to go, but that's where it finally needed to go. After that, it came together pretty quickly.”
“Trust Me” is available for purchase, and a reading will be held at the Book Bin on Nov. 1 at 5 p.m., alongside “The Entire Sky” author Joe Wilkins. “I never have much expectation once it comes out,” says Nadelson. “I hope that it might find its way into the hands of a few people that it moves in some way.”