Two metaphors to help me understand this book:
>a hair braid, and
>the movements of a classical music composition.
A friend of mine, using straws pulled from a holder at a coffeehouse, taught me how a hair braid is constructed: you work take three strands and keep moving from the outside toward the middle, alternating sides. This disappointed me because I wanted there to be a central strand for my metaphor to work:
This novel seems to spin outward from a central storyline to incorporate a panoply of stories. I wanted there to be a central core to my metaphor. My friend and I considered alternatives: maypoles and tether ball sets, but they seemed, frankly, too phallic to me.
Then it hit me: this story is a braid. The strand that gets things started is originally at the center: Kai Dionne, age 17, his dog Talia, and his grandfather Theo go out for their early morning walk in a small town/rural area of a northwestern state, where "cold air from Canada moves down the Rockies." It is winter, and the dog gets ahead of the boy and the boy gets ahead of the grandfather, who holds a flashlight. Talia runs onto the ice on the river, falls through; Kai goes in after him and down. The grandfather can only see where the tracks stopped and run the stream of light from his flashlight uselessly over the barren ice and snow. The whole town comes out to search for the bodies.
And then we get the braiding: the searchers' stories are integrated into their very act of searching. The wild Tulanie Rey McKenna, age 17, who took every physical challenge imaginable with the vitality of a bronco that refused to be tamed, was paralyzed in a bicycle accident. He watches from an attic.
Oleta Esteban was driving her daughter Dorrie in a car when they became involved in an accident, and she can no longer walk a block without weeping in guilt and grief for her dead daughter: had she not spent five seconds awakening her father with a kiss...
The now dead Dorrie Esteban with scars on her hips from an operation to give marrow to her sick brother Elia.
"The river roars under ice, churns dark in the hole Kai opened" (31).
Daniel Sidoti who went over the edge of a ridge after swerving to miss a deer and spent a night almost freezing in his truck. Car after car passed: an old man barely able to walk pulled him to safety as the truck exploded. In the newspaper the next day: a picture of the old man's ripped pants and, inside, a colostomy bag.
Iris Jenae McKenna, age 5, went missing, crawled in a culvert and under a porch and finally slept with the comfort afforded by a dog, but was eventually located because of a kindly old man with his own story: missing his wife, dead since November.
Arlo Dean, caught in a web of confusion and sadness and resentment, shot his own father.
"There's no reason some bodies float and some bodies fail."
Joseph Trujillo tried to kill himself by diving straight down from a high bridge. His neck snapped, but he failed to die.
"Nine hours lost this boy in the river."
These stories wrap the original central story of Kai and Talia, commenting, adding, ornamenting, thickening. A town emerges, a mythology emerges, of stories intertwining and layering; of love and resentment and heartbreak coiling around themselves.
"Love came as sparrows."
And always, what I most admire about Thon's writing, the ability to affirm life and love in the witnessing of the most abject pain.
(I wonder: Could a person who lived a charmed life ever practice real compassion?)
So that is the braid: the intertwining of the deadly love of Kai for Talia with story after story of wishing and wanting, desiring and demanding, caring in the face of no reason no care, and, mostly, vitality.
And now, for the metaphor of the musical composition:
Throughout the book is a counterpunctual play on human disaster. Some characters live through their accidents: Daniel Sidoti survived his horrific crash. Some get badly injured: the paralyzed Tulanie Rey. Some get scarred by medical intent: Dorrie Esteban. Some die: Dorrie and Kai.
A young girl was revived after hours in cold water.
"Who decides?"
This counterpoint seems to explore the randomness of nature's laws, that we do not live in a Newtonian universe of rigidity, but one that could go in very different directions given the same circumstances. Thon represents quantum reality at the emotional level. These are songs of not knowing but hoping, of living in possibility rather than certainty, of asking so much more of the universe than it can deliver, especially for these, the unprivileged rural people.
It is the quantum reality of consciousness: in many ways this is a Modernist novel along the lines of Faulkner and Woolf rather than, say, the constructions of a Pynchon. Thon uses music to tease out, not exactly construct, the patterns of thought and feeling, of consciousness; she unearths rather than builds. This is not a criticism; it is merely an observation.
Finally, the music ends with a coda: hibernating bears. A grizzly could break into the den and eat the cubs. Or not. There are the facts and laws of nature. There are the happenstances of wind and scent. Might. Could. Perhaps. We all, human and critter, live amid what could, what could, what could. Uncertainty defines us; no one decides; a randomness washes us down this river and
"The voice of the river that has
emptied into the Ocean
Now laughs and sings just like
God."
—Hafiz
___________________________
The Voice of the River page at FC2
Melanie Rae Thon at wikipedia
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