Mink River

It's not all about vampires, folks. Or witches, although you might not guess that from what I've been reading recently. This week I picked something completely different, Mink River by Brian Doyle. It's a book that I saw on a list of top reads for 2010 that the fine people at Powells Books sent out around Christmas time. My family thinks going to Portland without stopping at Powells is a wasted trip, so you can imagine I gave their list careful consideration. I picked half a dozen books off it and reserved them at the library. Not all of them worked for me (think C by Tom McCarthy, which I still haven't been able to finish....more on that later), but Mink River was so good that it made the whole project worthwhile.

Mink River reads like a 300 page poem. It's a mosaic that manages a coherent narrative structure. Each piece, whether it's a 300 word paragraph last lists every kind of bird that ever flew through the skies of Neawanaka or a page of dialogue where 4 word phrases get snapped back and forth, works together to tell the story of a small town on the Oregon coast. I felt submerged in the world that the author created, a world of The People and loggers and fishermen and Gaelic-speaking Irishmen, a world of appalling material poverty and incredible spiritual richness. A world of storytellers whose voices joined to create a final chorus of hope.

It's the underlying optimism that made this book work for me. I struggle with literary books, especially if I'm not familiar with the author, because I'm afraid they're going to hurt me. I can't stand it when an author kills off a character that I've grown attached to, regardless of the reason (see T. McCarthy). If I want to have to cope with the arbitrary cruelty that life can dish out, I'll go to work, thanks very much. That's why I stick with genre fiction, because there's a level of predictability that makes it safe.

Mink River teased me with disaster, but never crossed the line. Early on one of the characters suffers a horrific bicycle accident. "OMG," I thought, "the kid's going to be dead. I'm going to HATE this book." In fact, the kid doesn't die, although he is badly injured, and the story of his recovery is one of the threads that the author weaves through the rest of the book. A couple of the characters die, but the author frames their deaths in the context of the life of the town, not as independent engines of drama. It's not death and pain and loss that drive the story, but resilience and recovery and life.

Once I realized I could trust him, I was able to relax even further into the flow of his words. I could tell that the author loves words, but even more, he loves details. I could feel his love as he made minute observations of every single thing in the story. Then he put it all on the page. This style might make a reader impatient, especially someone who was accustomed to reading more graphic, streamlined work, but I thought it was luxurious. It wasn't the rococo excess of, say, Ann Rice, where the details spill all over themselves, each one grander than the last. This was an effort to really see, to know and to tell, everything. It was awesome in its scope and precise in its execution.

Part of the challenge with the "Powells Project" was to push myself beyond my comfort zone, to actually read something outside the urban occult/fantasy genre. Okay, so Hold Me Closer, Necromancer made my Powells list, but let's just say I'm reviewing it for the kids. Mink River made me glad I'd pushed myself. It made me glad I live in this world where such beautiful things are created.