Come on in, the water's fine
True North Andrew J. Graff Ecco
True North, Andrew J.
Graff 's warm-hearted story about a summer of whitewater rafting, offers just enough drama to be exciting and just enough reassurance that everybody will get home safe.
But the stakes couldn't be higher for Sam Brecht, the optimistic young man who puts this adventure in motion. Desperate to save his failing marriage, he's already run through a series of bold visions, including a pick-your-own blueberry farm that, somehow, never got off the ground. Now, with two kids and a new baby, Sam suspects he's about to lose his job as a high school art teacher, so he needs a sure thing.
But when your best side hustle starts with buying a 23-foot-long Winnebago, you're on the scenic route to bankruptcy. And yet that monster vehicle is only the smallest part of Sam's lastditch scheme. With money from his retirement savings he's also bought a rundown rafting company in Wisconsin. Back in the day, he and his wife, Swami, had fallen in love near a river. “Maybe,” he thinks, “another river could make everything right again.”
But what really alarms Swami is her husband's impracticality and self-delusion, chronic conditions that have started to present as incompetence and deceit. By the time True North begins, Swami's sexy smile has sagged into an exasperated frown. Even before this conflicted family reaches the Woodchuck Rafting Co., Sam hits a deer that puts their Winnebago out of service. When strangers finally tow them to the site of their new life, they discover a dilapidated barn, some old rafts and a collection of mouldy life-jackets.
True North is structured as a masculine romance: Sam gets to be the well-meaning, adorable dad who keeps screwing up, gosh darn it, while Swami is cast as the irritable shrew who needs to realize the error of her ways.
“Sam had let her down more than she'd ever imagined possible,” Graff concedes. “But she had let him fall.”
Still shaken by Paul Lynch's Booker-winning Prophet Song, about a nation slipping into fascism, I was happy to run off for a spell with Sam and his family. Given the paucity of hope and happiness in contemporary literary fiction, those feelings must be a lot harder to produce than irony and despair. If you're looking for wash over its characters, come on down. The water's great.
Indeed, the most terrific passages of True North send us shooting through rapids in prose that feels both precise and chaotic. Don't be surprised if waves crash over the margins of these pages. But you're safe. Very safe.