Fred's Way

About the Book

Fred’s Way is a coming-of-age novel about a young man torn between going off to college to become an ordained Lutheran pastor or staying home in Chicago to marry his high school sweetheart. It resonates with the agony of someone trying desperately—and often comically—to find his role in a society that refuses to fit his innocent expectations. The central character, Fred Hansen, is at root a mystic, alive to the wonder and glory of life. Like a latter-day Don Quixote, he’s never quite in synch with what others call reality, including the scientific world view of his premed roommate, Jimbo; the commonsense practicality of his girlfriend, Patsy; the argumentative mindset of Catherine Coyle, an attractive classmate with whom he gets entangled; or the spontaneous (and somewhat improvident) habits of Corning, a red-haired art major who lives down the hall. Fred’s Way recaptures the torrent of changes sweeping through America at the start of the 1960s and gently explores the heartaches and triumphs we all encounter in the process of trying to find our place in the world.

About the Author

Craig Nagel is a Minnesota author best known for two fine collections of short pieces written over many years for a weekly newspaper, the Lake Country Echo. His light touch, his compassion, and his perfect pitch evoke the joys and sorrows of daily life, and have earned him thousands of loyal readers. In this his first novel, Craig creates an imagined place—a fine liberal arts college of Lutheran persuasion—and sets within it a very bright, verbal, idealistic boy of the later 1950s. We follow Fred Hansen on his way via an interior commentary on events variously bewildering, ecstatic, shaming, hilarious, poignant. Keeping all this drama (much of it interior) going requires an authorial hand both gentle and sure; and Craig Nagel is that author. Fred’s Way is a story from the middle of the last century, when today’s grandparents were flocking to college, losing innocence, seeking faith. I had the powerful feeling on reading this manuscript that I “knew Fred Hansen when,” that I’d had those discussions with him in ’61 when it was all happening to me, that I could run into Fred at the Tip Top Cafe and call back that crazy night toward the end of our sophomore year. Fred’s Way reads like a prequel to the life of one of Craig’s newspaper column readers who pause on reading and smile, or sigh. It takes a fine novelist to do that, and this is indeed a fine novel. Douglas A. Davis, PhD. Emeritus Professor of Psychology Haverford College