The River King Review

This week's novel is The River King by Alice Hoffman.

Chalk House, one of the boys' dorms at the Haddan School, a pretentious boarding school, has a hazing ritual of bullying, intimidation, blackmail, and violence.  August Pierce, one of the new freshmen at Chalk House turns up dead in the river, either driven to suicide by the hazing or murdered as part of it.  A local detective looks into the death despite the small town of Haddan's scorn of the school and general agreement to leave them to their own devices.  Meanwhile, Gus' ghost keeps showing up in photographs and leaving presents of river rocks and minnows.

The prose here is beautiful if a bit opressive in large quantities.  It's something to be sipped rather than gulped.

Hoffman's storytelling creates a long series of tableaux of different characters.  She circles around the town and the school, into memories and town history, flowing between characters and returning to events later from a different point of view.  This way the characters and the events get filled in one detail at a time, occasionally large pieces slotting into place.  It's kind of like watching a painter work one color over here and over there, adding details one place, then adding swaths of color another.

It reminded me of the News from Lake Woebegone.  She shifts through topics in a single paragraph, giving an overview of town, mentioning minor characters who are interconnected and become more faceted each time we see them.  Then the story always circles back to the environment--the overcast sky or the willows by the river or the warblers flying over the school.  It makes the characters feel like part of the environment, the setting, the tapestry of the town.

"This boy on the riverbank was only a few years younger than Abe's brother was in that horrible year, the one Abe and Joey still didn't discuss.  People in the village remembered it as the time there were no trout; a man could fish for hours, all day, if he liked, and not catch sight of a single one.  Several environmentalists came out from Boston to investigate, but no one ever determined the cause.  That wonderful species of silver trout seemed destined to become extinct, and people in town were simply going to have to accept the loss, but the following spring, the trout reappeared, just like that.  Pete Byers from over at the pharmacy was the first to notice.  Although he himself was too gentle a soul to go fishing, and was known to faint at the sight of a bloodworm cut in two, Pete loved the river and walked its banks every morning, two miles out of town and two miles back.  One fine day, as he headed home, the river looked silver, and sure enough, when he knelt down, there were so many trout he would have been able to catch one in his bare hands, had he been so inclined."

There was some weird gender stuff going on when she spoke in broad strokes about the town ladies or the girls' dorm that made it seem like this was set in the fifties.  And I wish at the end that there had been more justice served.  I wanted Gus' ghost to make a dramatic appearance and get vengeance, or I wanted the detective or the photography teacher or Gus' friend Carlin to have a moment of brilliant, cathartic cunning to get solid evidence or a confession before a shocked crowd.  Instead the story ends bittersweet.  And I don't think that's a spoiler.  I think it's fitting, because a climax would be too much plot and not in keeping with the spirit of the book.  But my wanting justice even if I knew it wouldn't happen just speaks to how involved I got with the characters.


***
Next week's novel: Annihilation, eerie sci-fi by Jeff VanderMeer