Book Report: The River

6. Peter Heller, The River (2019) (3/21/2020)

This book is part character study, part thriller—and part beautiful, lyrical description of riverine wilderness up near Hudson Bay.Then again, throw in an apocalyptic forest fire, and all bets are off.

The active players are few: two college students, Jack and Wynn, who bonded immediately upon meeting two years before at Dartmouth, and now are on a (so they think) relaxing month-long canoe trip; a husband-wife team of geochemists who are on the outs; and a couple of fishermen who seem to live on Ancient Age bourbon. There are also memories, especially of a traumatic experience in Jack's life when he lost his mother, but also simple flashbacks to previous good times, and times not so good, which give good insight into the characters.

As events unfold, Jack is shown to be stubborn, uncompromising—and pragmatic; while Wynn is more of a dreamer, who wants to give the benefit of the doubt. They work well together, until events spin out of control.

I won't give away the story. It did require, for me, some suspension of disbelief (that seems to be my favorite phrase anymore when it comes to reviewing books, particularly mysteries or thrillers—go figure). This was true especially in a key event and the motivation behind it, involving the husband-wife pair.

I was also a little irritated by Heller's writing style: he does love run-on sentences. Sometimes they worked okay enough—like when he was trying to spin out the chaotic tension of escaping the fire; as here:

The burning debris rained down, they swiped it off arms, shoulders, and Jack had to hustle to Maia to kick a burning limb away from her leg—an inconstant blizzard of sparks, bunches of pine needles flaming like flares, birch leaves ignited to molten lace rained down, but the wind had gone quiet, it eddied as if confused, circled around them like a dog settling for sleep, the dense smoke had lightened, the jet roar had yielded to the crackling and shirr of a thousand campfires, it was eerie.

Like I said, okay enough, in this scene of chaos. (Though really: ", . . . it was eerie"?) But in the earlier parts of the book, where everything is calm and easy and Jack and Wynn are just happy, I was annoyed by Heller's love of the word "and." And I have to say, I expected a flip-knife to play a much larger role.

What I especially enjoyed about the book, though, was the characterization of Jack and Wynn. Heller clearly gave a lot of thought to them: their unlikely, and yet also very likely, friendship. They grew up under different circumstances, but they also both loved the outdoors, the water—especially fishing—and they also loved literature and philosophy: thinking about the meaning of it all, and the beauty of words. (Perhaps there's something of Heller himself in both these characters.)

Here are, respectively, descriptions of a bit of each of Wynn and Jack:

Wynn heard the knock of stone as Jack moved outside, and he also heard the slow creek making the faintest ripple. He thought of the Merwin poem about dusk that he loved so much. Merwin describes the sun going down believing in nothing, and how he hears the stream running after it: It has brought its flute it is a long way.
 It killed him. The one and only sun without belief in anything and the little stream believing so hard, believing in music even. What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.

Jack believed in luck. The turning of a card that sent a life in one direction or another. The slip of a single hoof on stone, the sound of two voices in the mist. He believed in it as much as he believed in any other thing, like loyalty or hard work. And sometimes the places that happenstance sent you weren't as vague as a direction, sometimes they were as steel-cast and unforgiving as a set of rails. And sometimes the only way to jump the rails and set a new course was to have a wreck. Right now they needed speed. And he felt some comfort in the rifle propped at his feet; they might need that, too.

Finally, Heller's descriptions of the landscape, both in full late-summer fruit and, just a few days later, in utter devastation, are masterful—lyric, intimate, sensual, exuberant, stark. Convincing. There is sheer joy in the bounty and beauty of the land. The fire itself is conveyed largely through smell and sound, and is horrifying. I have a passage flagged, but . . .

Instead I'll close with the W. S. Merwin poem Wynn was thinking of, "Dusk in Winter"—because I think it might be the metaphor that illuminates this whole book:

The sun sets in the cold without friends
Without reproaches after all it has done for us
It goes down believing in nothing
When it has gone I hear the stream running after it
It has brought its flute it is a long way