Fascinating, fierce portrait of a family

The epic novel is a dying art, or so we’re often told. Who has the time or inclination to spend 20 or 30 hours with one story? It’s a question you might ask before sitting down with a Karl Marlantes novel.

In “Matterhorn,” his 2010 debut, he coupled heft (more than 600 pages) with a relentless and epic story that captures the lives of a group of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. The book is widely hailed as a masterpiece, a view I share. There are scenes from that novel that still haunt me almost a decade after reading them.

“Deep River,” Marlantes’ new novel, is also epic. It spans nearly 40 years and two continents, clocking in at over 700 pages, the vast majority of which are a paean to the Koski family, Finnish immigrants who flee political persecution in their homeland to settle in the wilderness near the Columbia River on the Washington and Oregon border at the turn of the 20th century. They become loggers and fishermen, farmers and labor advocates, friends and lovers, rivals and bitter enemies. They suffer privation and indignity, they are exploited and tenacious, and their perseverance through it all is the stuff of the American mythos.

That American mythos is not the only one at play in the pages of this book. Marlantes undergirds “Deep River” with elements of the “Kalevala,” or Finnish national epic, which is another story of people pitted against great difficulties. Certainly, the adversities the Koski family faces are monumental, and it is in their daily work that the novel comes most

Deep River