The river A novel

Review by New York Times Review

JACK AND WYNN, college-student and childhood friends, are canoeing and camping in northern Canada. Both are young but experienced outdoorsmen who have been flown in and dropped at a barely mapped river in the middle of hundreds of miles of forest. They have deliberately chosen not to bring a satellite phone so that they can experience the spirit of the pioneers they revere. Peter Heller's "The River" opens with the pair canoeing through fog and hearing a man and woman having a furious argument somewhere on shore. The sound is carried across the water, but the vegetation is so thick they can't see anyone. They don't know if they should hurry past or stop and intervene. It's a striking premise: the majesty of the vast Canadian wilderness juxtaposed with a confusingly awkward social situation. A few hours later, the stakes are raised when the smell of smoke wafts in on the wind: A wildfire has gripped the forest and is headed their way. They decide to turn back to warn the warring couple. After searching, they finally encounter the man alone. He says he lost his wife in the fog, but he has a wild, shifty look in his eye and an inexplicable injury to his leg. Jack and Wynn go to look for the woman, heading ever closer to the fire. Humans are both the victims and source of corruption in this novel. Initially it reads as slightly puritanical - drunks are bad, fat people are dumb, Jack and Wynn are handsome and good at everything - but this tendency reverses so completely and shockingly at the end that it can almost, but not quite, knock any smugness from a reader. The real delight is the nature writing. "The River" is a fiction addition to the New Landscape writing of Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, prose so vivid and engaging that a city-dwelling reviewer can feel the clammy cold of a fog over a river or the heat of subterranean tree roots burning underfoot in the aftermath of a fire. Heller, the author of "The Dog Stars" and other novels, has an extraordinary facility for describing topography and vegetation; we can feel the sharpness of the rocks and the trilling excitement of the river as it approaches rapids. He brilliantly describes the physical process of wild living - shaking snowflakes of frost from a sleeping bag in the morning "like an icy hatch of mayflies," the joy of drinking sweet tea on a cold beach. Early encounters with wildlife become eerie as the animals disappear, fleeing the fire. There is a tendency toward status-flagging in this novel. A character with vital information is unconscious for a good deal of the story and comes to only to tell us that she is a "Rhode Island Brown" and to brag about her publications. I didn't need to know that Jack and Wynn are at Dartmouth, nor that they got in with ease. This social positioning tempers the peril a little, making the boys seem like adventuretourists who could have done something else with their academic sabbaticals. But none of that really affects the utter joy contained in this book, which is a suspenseful tale told with glorious drama and lyrical flair. ? DENISE MINA'S next novel, "Conviction," will be published in May.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Taking time off from jobs and classes, Dartmouth pals and consummate outdoorsmen Jack and Wynn, "diehards nostalgic for the days of the voyageurs," undertake a weeks-long canoe trip in Northern Canada. Colorado rancher's son Jack is the quicker-witted, tougher of the two, while Wynn's sensitive connection to nature stems from his Vermont youth spent steeped in art and literature. The boys' fluency with one another and the rugged landscape is quickly tested, though, by an encroaching wildfire and their unknowing entry into an argument between the married couple they try to warn about it. Disasters, growing in severity, eat away at their provisions and their sanity. Heller (Celine, 2017) once again chronicles life-or-death adventure with empathy for the natural world and the characters who people it. He writes most mightily of the boys' friendship and their beloved, uncompromising wilderness, depicting those layers of life that lie far beyond what is more commonly seen: the fire's unapologetic threats, the wisdom of the birds and animals seeking their own safety, and the language of the river itself.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Heller (Celine) explores human relationships buffeted by outside forces in his suspenseful latest. The central friendship is between two young men, Wynn and Jack, students who have taken a leave of absence from Dartmouth to explore the Canadian wilderness. Their late summer canoe trip, however, finds them pursued by two dangerous natural foes-a rapidly advancing wildfire and the equally swift approach of freezing temperatures. Their trip is further complicated when the two men's intervention in a domestic drama results in the addition of a deeply traumatized woman, Maia, to their traveling party. Short on supplies, racing against disaster toward civilization, Jack and Wynn's loyalties to one another are repeatedly strained. Jack and Wynn-who are both effortlessly erudite while also seemingly adept at virtually every skill of the outdoorsman-may be too well-rounded to be entirely believable. Their motivations are convincing, however, especially when nature's violence rekindles Jack's memories of his mother's accidental death years earlier. Maia, conversely, can at times feel more like a plot device than like a woman with an inherently dramatic story of her own. Nevertheless, with its evocative descriptions of nature's splendor and brutality, Heller's novel beautifully depicts the powers that can drive humans apart-and those that compel them to return repeatedly to one another. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation. Since they both enjoy the outdoors, they design a wilderness canoe trip in remote northern Canada to test their skills and hone their friendship. The young men forgo the safety of carrying a satellite phone, and though their timing is excellent for avoiding the worst of insects, their trip is imperiled by a raging forest fire, and complicated by their discovery of a severely injured woman they must get to a hospital. The intrigue and desperation Wynn and Jack must feel doesn't quite come through to the listener. The details of the early autumn forest, canoeing, portaging, and fly-fishing are spot on, as are the descriptions of the raging fire and its aftermath. Vocal characterizations by Mark Deakins are excellent, though Heller (Celine) doesn't give either Wynn or Jack much in the way of personality. VERDICT Recommended for adult audio fiction collections. Heller is very popular and patrons will certainly want to check out this one.--Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Two college friends' leisurely river trek becomes an ordeal of fire and human malice.For his fourth novel, Heller swaps the post-apocalyptic setting of his previous book, The Dog Stars (2012), for present-day realismin this case a river in northern Canada where Dartmouth classmates Jack and Wynn have cleared a few weeks for fly-fishing and whitewater canoeing. Jack is the sharp-elbowed scion of a Colorado ranch family, while Wynn is a more easygoing Vermontera divide that becomes more stark as the novel progressesbut they share a love of books and the outdoors. They're so in sync early on that they agree to lose travel time to turn back and warn a couple they'd overheard arguing that a forest fire is fast approaching. It's a fateful decision: They discover the woman, Maia, near death and badly injured, apparently by her homicidal husband, Pierre. When Wynn unthinkingly radios Pierre that she's been found alive, Wynn and Jack realize they're now targets as well. Heller confidently manages a host of tensionsJack and Wynn becoming suspicious of each other while watching for Pierre, straining to keep Maia alive, and paddling upriver to reach civilization and escape the nearing blaze. And his pacing is masterful as well, briskly but calmly capturing the scenery in slower moments, then running full-throttle and shifting to barreling prose when danger is imminent. (The fire sounds like "turbines and the sudden shear of a strafing plane, a thousand thumping hooves in cavalcade, the clamor and thud of shields clashing, the swelling applause of multitudes.") And though the tale is a familiar one of fending off the deadliness of the wilderness and one's fellow man, Heller has such a solid grasp of nature (both human and the outdoors) that the storytelling feels fresh and affecting. In bringing his characters to the brink of death (and past it), Heller speaks soberly to the random perils of everyday living.An exhilarating tale delivered with the pace of a thriller and the wisdom of a grizzled nature guide. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue   They had been smelling smoke for two days. At first they thought it was another campfire and that sur­prised them because they had not heard the engine of a plane and they had been traveling the string of long lakes for days and had not seen sign of another person or even the distant movement of another canoe. The only tracks in the mud of the portages were wolf and moose, otter, bear. The winds were west and north and they were moving north so if it was another party they were ahead of them. It per­plexed them because they were smelling smoke not only in early morning and at night, but would catch themselves at odd hours lifting their noses like coyotes, nostrils flaring. And then one evening they pulled up on a wooded island and they made camp and fried a meal of lake trout on a driftwood fire and watched the sun sink into the spruce on the far shore. Late August, a clear night becoming cold. There was no aurora borealis, just the dense sparks of the stars blown from their own ancient fire. They climbed the hill. They did not need a headlamp as they were used to moving in the dark. Sometimes if they were feeling strong they paddled half the night. They loved how the darkness amplified the sounds--the gulp of the dipping paddles, the knock of the wood shaft against the gunwale. The long desolate cry of a loon. The loons especially. How they hollowed out the night with longing. Tonight there was no loon and almost no wind and they went up through tamarack and hemlock and a few large birch trees whose pale bark fluoresced. At the top of the knoll they fol­lowed a game trail to a ledge of broken rock as if they weren't the first who had sought the view. And they saw it. They looked northwest. At first they thought it was the sun, but it was far too late for any lingering sunset and there were no cities in that direction for a thousand miles. In the farthest distance, over the trees, was an orange glow. It lay on the horizon like the light from banked embers and it fluttered barely so they wondered if it was their eyes and they knew it was a fire. A forest fire, who knew how far off or how big, but bigger than any they could imagine. It seemed to spread over two quad­rants and they didn't say a word but the silence of it and the way it seemed to breathe scared them to the bone. The prevail­ing wind would push the blaze right to them. At the pace they were going they were at least two weeks from the Cree village of Wapahk and Hudson Bay. When the most northerly lake spilled into the river they would pick up speed but there was no way to shorten the miles. ***   On the morning after seeing the fire they did spot another camp. It was on the northeastern verge of a wooded island and they swung out to it and were surprised that no one was break­ing down the large wall tent. No one was going anywhere. There was an old white-painted square-stern woodstrip canoe on the gravel with a trolling motor clamped to the transom and two men in folding lawn chairs, legs sprawled straight. Jack and Wynn beached and hailed them and the men lifted their arms. They had a plastic fifth of Ancient Age bourbon on the stones between the chairs. The heavier one wore a flannel shirt and square steel-rimmed tinted glasses, the skinny one a Texans cap. Two spinning rods and a Winchester Model 70 bolt-action rifle leaned against a pine. Jack said, "You-all see the fire?" The skinny one said, "You-all see any pussy?" The men burst out laughing. They were drunk. Jack felt disgust, but being drunk on a summer morning didn't deserve a death sentence. Jack said, "There's a fire. Big-ass fire to the northwest. What you've been smelling the last few days." Wynn said, "You guys have a satellite phone?" That set them off again. When they were finished laughing, the heavy one said, "You two need to chillax. Whyn't you pull up a chair." There were no extra chairs. He lifted the bourbon by the neck between two fingers and rocked it toward them. Jack held up a hand and the man shrugged and brought the fifth up, watching its progress intently as though he was oper­ating a crane. He drank. The lake was a narrow reach and if the fire overran the western shore this island would not keep the men safe. "How've you been making the portages?" Jack said. He meant the carries between the lakes. There were five lakes, string­ing south to north. Some of the lakes were linked by chan­nels of navigable river, others by muddy trails that necessitated unloading everything and carrying. The last lake flowed into the river. It was a big river that meandered generally north a hundred and fifty miles to the Cree village and the bay. Jack was not impressed with the men's fitness level. "We got the wheely thing," the skinny man said. He made a sweeping gesture at the camp. "We got just about everything," the fat man said. "Except pussy." The two let out another gust of laughter. Jack said, "The fire's upwind. There. We figure maybe thirty miles off. It's a killer." The fat man brought them into focus. His face turned serious. "We got it covered," he said. "Do you? It's all copacetic here. Whyn't you have a drink?" He gestured at Wynn. "You, the big one--what's your name?" "Wynn." "He's the mean one, huh?" The fat man cocked his head at Jack. "What's his name? Go Home? Win or Go Home. Ha!"   Wynn didn't know what to say. Jack looked at them. He said, "Well, you might get to high ground and take a look thataway one evening." He pointed across the lake. He didn't think either of them would climb a hill or a tree. He waved, wished them luck without conviction, and he and Wynn got in their canoe and left. *** On the third day after seeing the fire they were paddling the east shore of a lake called Blueberries. What it said on the map, and it was an odd name and no way to make it sound right. Blueberries Lake. They were paddling close to shore because the wind was up and straight out of the west and rocking them badly. It was a strange morning: a hard frost early that lingered and then the wind rose up and the black waves piled into them nearly broadside, rank on rank. The tops of the whitecaps blew into the sides of their faces and the waves lapped over the port gunwale so that they decided to surf into a cobble beach and they snapped on the spray deck that covered the open canoe. But there was fog, too. The wind tore into a dense mist and did not blow it away. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it. They were paddling close to shore and they heard shouting. At first they thought it was birds or wolves. They didn't know what. As with the fire, they could not at first countenance the cause. Human voices were the last thing they expected but that's what it was. A man shouting and a woman's remonstra­tion, high and angry. The cries shredded in the wind. Wynn half turned in the bow and pointed with his paddle, but only for a second as they needed speed for headway or they would capsize. His gesture was a question: Should we stop? An hour before, when they had beached to put on the spray skirt, they had landed hard. Wynn was heavier and having his weight in front had helped in the wind, but then they had surfed a wave into shore and thwomped onto the rocks, which thankfully were smooth; if the beach had been limestone shale they would have broken the boat. It was a dangerous maneuver. They could not make out the words, but the woman sounded furious and the man did not sound menacing, just outraged. Jack shook his head. A couple might expect privacy in their home, why shouldn't they be granted the same in the mid­dle of nowhere? They could not see the figures or even the shore, but now and then there was an intimation of trees, just a shadow in the tearing fog, a dark wall which they knew was the edge of the forest, and they paddled on.   Excerpted from The River: A Novel by Peter Heller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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