‘The River’ is brimming with wonder
Thriller spotlights rigors of survival
Few people, Peter Heller writes early on in his poetic and unnerving wilderness thriller “The River” (Knopf, 253 pp., ★★★☆), have the luck to die “in the prime of life.”
It’s an unusual observation in a book filled with them, but it could also be a thesis statement for a novel ultimately about surviving the worst the world of man and nature has to offer. If you’re coming face-toface with the dead end of things, it’s likely better to be young and filled with optimism instead of old and sick; at least then it’s a fair fight. But who wants to die young if you lose?
For Jack and Wynn – college best friends paddling from Hudson Bay in late fall, the Canadian winter about to drop on them – a trip through the wilderness is their chance to get away from the real-life rigors of Dartmouth. But these aren’t your average college juniors Snapchatting their lives away. Both are avid outdoorsmen already haunted by the realities of life: Jack, small but noble and tough, is preoccupied by the death of his mother (she’s the impetus for Heller’s observation), and is convinced now that tragedy looms, which of course it does, for all of us.
Wynn, meanwhile, is shaped like a linebacker but opposed to emotional conflict. He’s a naturalist who feels more at home under the stars than in the classroom or in the arms of a lover, his own nobility clear enough by the joy he finds ferrying his disabled sister up a mountain, or quoting poetry, his optimism an unfailing truth. These are the kind of soft-spoken young men of another era, the kind who’ll and you to death, but who can also handle themselves in a bar fight.
Did men like this ever exist outside of Jim Harrison novels? Maybe it doesn’t matter. While they both may teeter toward the archetypical, Heller uses them in surprising, often unreliable ways, each man’s character stretched to the limit of his seemingly hard-wired code. Because when the chief antagonist is nature, there’s no way to reason with your problem.
In this case, “problem” means fire. A vast conflagration bears down on the river, at first maybe 30 miles away, but each moment it comes closer. The boys sense the fire more than see it, a glow in the distance. Herds of fleeing animals. And then, at once, it’s the air itself, Jack explaining that being on the water is no better than standing still on the shore.
“It’ll jump the river like a semi running over a chipmunk … The air gets superheated. That’s what creates a firestorm. The rolling smoke is actually gas, and if the wind is right and it ignites, it’ll flash-bake you a quarter mile away.”
Clearly, they need to get out. And fast. Which isn’t going to happen.
The men stumble upon an attempted murder – a young woman beaten half-to-death by her jealous husband – which forces them to save the woman and hunt for the husband, all while fleeing the very real chance they’ll be cooked alive. If this sounds, well, half-baked … it isn’t. Heller imbues this story with a kind of mythological reverence for the land and for the old ways of men, for the “essential decency” of humans in general. Which is to say that when faced with toxic masculinity, Jack and Wynn do the right thing. Or try.
“The River” is slim – just over 250 pages – but it is full of consequences. Every move Jack and Wynn make along the river has the chance to kill them or those they’re trying to save, and the result sweeps you away, each page filled with awe for a natural world we can quantify with science but can rarely predict with emotion.