The River Why by David James Duncan

Abstract

Reviews 269 Vanderhaeghe’s stories are not without faults. The inevitable bleakness of his vision is sometimes itself pretentious, and he needs to overcome a young writer’s dependence on overt and not always appropriate symbols. But this is a fresh voice, one to be welcomed. I only hope it indicates a new direction in “men’s writing.” ARITHA van HERK Vancouver, British Columbia The River Why. ByDavid James Duncan. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1983. 294 pages, $12.95.) The story goes that the manuscript of The River Why came sailing over an editor’s transom one day from a young man living in the outback of Oregon. In accepting it, Sierra Club Books, known for its reputable offerings on conservation matters, placed itself in double jeopardy by breaking prece­ dent and printing a novel, to boot the first volume by an unknown writer with little more to his credit than that he learned to read and fish in 1957. To the publisher’scredit, however, The River Why iscraftily written, and it may turn out to be zany enough to break the current doldrums besetting the book-buying public. Is it a picaresque novel, a coming-of-age memoir, a boy-meets-girl story, a fish tale, a Zen treatise, or an addle-headed, happytimes adventure? A little of each. And, though Mr. Duncan cannot bring the whole thing off entirely, he marks himself as a writer of radiant potential. His first novel is one of those books that the reader hesitates to finish because putting it down for the last time brings on a pleasant sorrow of loss. The novel’s first-person, avid-fisherman hero both mocks and compli­ ments himself as the “Most-Out-Of-It” person in his high school class. Follow­ ing graduation, he leaves his feuding parents and moves into a little cabin on an isolated river in the drizzly Cascade Range, his purpose, “to fish all day, every day, first light to last.” But his dream to cast his life away in such a fashion soon sours. “Gus the Fish,” as he also likes to be known, is soon sated. He finds himself plagued at his tender age by insomnia, restlessness, and a vague sense of spiritual ill-being. The onset of malaise occurs early in the book, and the portrayal of Gus working his way out of the psychic infirmity, of his painful coming to terms with approaching manhood, is the process of the next two hundred pages. The development is blithely episodic, a feature some critics will fault. But what episodes! Gus pitches from one slough of despair into another, emerging each time in this tragicomic but believable romance a little more bruised but toughened. Lost in his boat and floating through the fog to the sea, he “rescues” the corpse of a drowned man and nearly loses his own life. He wakes up hung over in a strange house with a huge dog baring its fangs over him. He will discover that the beast’s name is Descartes, a fact, as are most 270 Western American Literature of the details in the book, calculated to be both tongue-in-cheek and weighty with significance. Other passages pursue the lighthearted and the lyrical. Keen to the ways of fish and becoming wise in the ways of men, Gus dupes the blowhard out­ doors reporter from the local newspaper, seducing him into printing a bizarre tale of piscatorial feats that earns the journalist a threatened suit from the makers of Hostess cupcakes. Yin balances yang. A girl fisherman leads Gus on a seductive goose chase that becomes the subplot of the novel. It produces some of the most innocently erotic passages since Juliet threw Romeo the rose. None of this can quite justify the hectic though entertaining shambles of the plot. And Duncan’s writing blunders badly in two specific places. The first concerns — disaster of disasters for the Sierra Club’sworthy land ethic — the introduction of an “old Indian” who woodenly delivers an ecological sermon before the backdrop of a new dam. The second involves the untangling of events at book’s end and is best not dealt with here...