Agee, Jonis. The River Wife. New York: Random House, 2007.

Full disclosure: I'm thanked on this novel's acknowledgments page. In name and everything.

(Don't you always think that full disclosure statements in book reviews and pieces of reporting always have a tinge of bragging in them? The above one sure does.)

I'm interested in point of view, here, with this novel, in that it's a multigenerational epic of the 19th and 20th century South following the life and loves of a French fur trapper and river pirate Jacques Ducharme. It's an adventure novel, in many ways, with terrible storms and destruction and murders and pirating and animal attacks. And yet the novel never spends time with Jacques, it spends all its time with Jacques's wives. This sounds like a critique and I'll go ahead and say that a lot of times during the reading of the novel I wanted to leave the house and go watch Jacques do something exciting, but it's clear that Jonis is telling reader to bring such a critique on, that the obvious and near indefensible critique of this critique is this question: Why can't adventure novels be written about the women who go through them?

For instance, here's a sentence I'd never write this for a ton of reasons: "Leland St. Clair's law office was about as interesting as a men's social club in a Henry James novel." First, I don't remember having coming across social clubs in Henry James's novels. Surely they're there though. Second, aren't men's social clubs in Henry James novels incredibly interesting? In a post metrosexual world any men's social club is interesting and worth spending time reading about, I say.

But maybe they're not. Here's how Jonis describes it:

On the walls hung pictures of St. Clair posed with a variety of cougars, bears, geese, deer, ducks, turtledoves, rabbits, any and everything that could be killed with a gun, bow, or knife. There he was, in every one of them, a man so small he could pass for a boy, with a little toothy smile on his face. His clothes were always so neat and clean in the pictures, she suspected that he hadn't killed the game at all, just had someone to do it for him. Which was what she worried about—that he was one of those. (319)

It's easy for me to think that men's social clubs were frequented by men that were fascinating. But one can just as easily think about men that were small. Today this seems important.

I want to quote one more paragraph because it's my favorite. Ignore the names of all the characters. Just know they're all caught up in each others' pasts:

While L.O. and Hillis went off into the dark bowels of the store in search of nippers, Maddie wondered if living in one place for generations made all of them appear to each other as Hillis did to her. Ethel May saw the outrage of Jacques Ducharme every time she saw his daughter, so it wasn't her at all, not entirely or mostly, it was the collective wrongs of another person's life she wore like a suffocating robe over her own. Only it wasn't just Da she was responsible for, it was his first wife Annie, Omah and Frank and their children, her grandmother Miz Maddie and mother Laura, Frank Boudreau, and now Valdean French. Maddie barely had room for her own crimes and L.O. No wonder Ethel May and the others were so outraged, it was a burden having to carry herself and her encyclopedic history. Human memory—what a compendium of lies, half truths, myths, bound by the flimsy string of a person's life. No wonder there was something of guilty relief when a person died, got themselves off the page, gave everyone around them the chance to close at least one book. Maybe they were better off not knowing each other very well, but then they had to make up what they weren't witness to—and that was even more arduous. (373)

Why live in a place where everyone in town knows not just you and your past transgressions, but the past transgressions of your parents and grandparents before you? People like to think of history as a foundation for existence, but look how also it's a burden, something to be overcome. There's nothing that better shows me the mean, spiteful hell of life in tiny towns than do the two novels of Jonis's that I've read, and yet her heroines always stay put. I'll have to ask her to explain this to me.