Ride the River by Louis L’Amour
1984; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1984.0070
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
Resumo66 Western American Literature The Bonner Boys: A Novel About Texans. By Campbell Geeslin. (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1981. 191 pages, $11.95.) Somehow this well-written, bittersweet novel slipped past many reviewers a couple of years ago. Too bad. It evokes serious questions about growing up, growing old, growing away, and does so with an eloquent indirection. Its effect is a little like the sound one character heard: “a soft paperlike rustle that made him shiver. Under the quilt was a dry snakeskin, intact.” Campbell Geeslin reveals a number of dry snakeskins in this tight novel. Geeslin, who grew up in West Texas, sets The Bonner Boys in his native area where five middle-aged brothers and their momma assemble. His gentle probing, often humorous, makes clear that he, too, is coming to grips with how much West Texas dwells in him and what it means. This is a good, interesting novel, one well worth reading. One hopes it isn’t Geeslin’s only venture into the form. GERALD HASLAM Sonoma State University Ride the River. By Louis L’Amour. (New York: Bantam Books, 1983. 184 pages, $2.95.) Ride the River by Louis L’Amour is the seventeenth novel in his ongoing Sackett saga. Coming on the heels of his recent hardbound bestseller, The Lonely Gods (March 1983), this novel (issued in July) attests once more to his prolific versatility. The first three Sackett novels, in chronological order of action, are Sackett’s Land (published 1974), To the Far Blue Mountains (1976), and The Warrior’s Path (1980) ; they deal with clan-founder Barnabas Sackett and two of his sons, Kin Ring Sackett and Yance Sackett, from 1599 to 1630. In order of action, Ride the River comes next, and introduces Miss Echo Sackett, sixteen-year-old narrator of much of the novel, who in about three weeks in 1840 goes to Philadelphia to claim an artificially long-delayed inheri tance from Kin, to wrest it from the hands of a crooked lawyer there, and then to return safely with it — through natural and manmade perils — to Tuckalucky Cove, Tennessee, and her widowed old mother and her injured Uncle Regal Sackett. Next in terms of action is the famous seven-novel sequence featuring the activities of William Tell Sackett and his brothers Orrin and Tyrel, from 1866 to 1878 or so. In an “Author’sNote” at the end of Ride the River, L’Amour informs us that its heroine Echo Sackett will become the aunt of Tell, Orrin, and Tye Sackett in some of the promised ten or so addi tional Sackett works. The other six Sackett books already published interlock with and follow the seven Tell tales, feature many collateral family members, but never mention Aunt Echo. Ride the River is a suspenseful yarn of twenty-two chapters, falling into four unequal (and unnumbered) parts: first, Echo in Philadelphia; second, Reviews 67 Echo en route home as far as Pittsburgh and just beyond; third, Echo aboard an Ohio River steamboat out of Wheeling; and fourth, Echo and much derring-do, in which sheproves more resourceful than anywould-be allyor foe. The novel has weaknesses enough to sink a lesser talent than L’Amour, or one less popular with perhaps properly uncritical readers. The heroine should have asked a few of her dozen or so male Sackett cousins for help. The hero, spoiled but broad-shouldered nephew ofan old Sackett family friend in Philadelphia (L’Amour fans will recognise their last name — Chantry), should have been ordered into action with more celerity. The villains — they appear in timed-release squads — should have searched Echo and her carpet bag more professionally; they would have relished doing so. L’Amour delays action not only to describe selective locales while ignoring others but also to backtrack three years at one point. There is one silly episode, to stage a boxing match (does any L’Amour novel lack such?) between hero and villain No. 2. Stylistic weaknesses are also occasionally prominent. Echo Sackett starts off as our narrator, but in two chapters the narrative voice shifts com pletely, while it does so in part in five other chapters. L’Amour continues to...
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