Under the surface, a lazy 'River'
River of Heaven
By Lee Martin
Shaye Areheart, 265 pp., $24
Sam Brady is 65 and gay, living a solitary life with his basset hound Stump in the southern Illinois town of Mount Gilead. His world has been defined by the secret he has kept over what really happened to Dewey Finn, his boyhood pal. Dewey was struck and killed by a train one April night a half-century ago and has always been presumed a suicide.
But over several months, as Sam encounters other lonely people - a widower and widow, an angry teenager, an inquisitive reporter, a long-lost brother - that secret slowly comes to the surface, reshaping all of their lives.
Lee Martin, who has authored five previous books and teaches creative writing at Ohio State University, explores in "River of Heaven" the tenuous landscape of unfulfilled relationships and how they can be made whole. But unfortunately, his novel is little more than a mechanically unfolding plot, meticulous in design but short on artistry.
It is obvious in the first chapter, for instance, that the secret of Dewey's death will serve as that peremptory element of suspense to drive the novel, hinted at now and then but unveiled only in the final chapter. That is fine, if unimaginative. Not fine is that these hints will be more like shouts from on high, told rather than shown, in which Sam simply instructs the reader to be patient, for the secret will eventually be revealed.
"This may not seem like much, this story I'm telling, but you have to understand what it is to be me - a man who has always been afraid of himself," Sam says at the end of the first chapter, suddenly turning from the narrative action to speak directly to the reader. "You have to know the rest of my story, the part I can't yet bring myself to say. A story of a boy I knew a long time ago and a brother I loved and then lost."
Further, the characters are fascinating in theory but caricatures in execution, as bloodless and cliché in conversation as they are linear in dimensionality, exacerbating the plot problem. When Sam's renegade older brother, Cal, who also knows the secret, returns to Mount Gilead from Ohio and tracks down Sam to live with him, they have the following conversation, Cal speaking first.
"Sometimes I think that night with Dewey made my whole life."
"Mine, too."
"Made it something I didn't want it to be. Sent me out on a road that ended up in Ohio."
"Now you're home. Now it's you and me."
As a result of these flaws, the rich thematic possibility of this novel is never fully realized, as the many intriguing ways in which the fractured lives of these characters are made complete vanish in its relentlessly flat and formulaic black hole. "River of Heaven" reads as if Martin spent so much creative energy outlining the plot that he had none left to write the novel itself, leaving it devoid of magic.
Robert Braile reviews regularly for the Globe. 