Purposeless Confusion
AMES, ELIZABETH
Purposeless Confusion River of Light By Brenda Peterson Knopf. 303 pp. $8.95 Reviewed by Elizabeth Ames_ The trouble with River of Light, Brenda Peterson's novel about north Georgia, is that...
...The book jumps ahead a few more years and we discover that Nettie is alive, though not thriving...
...Jessie strained to hear their words and saw them metamorphose into the shapes of their stories...
...Time for another flashback, this one in the history of Jessie and her son Nate...
...Her altered personality holds a peculiar fascination for young Ira...
...Occasionally the mist clears...
...She was cured by the "Mambo woman," whose spells and potions took Jessie on a hallucinatory journey to the novel's puzzling ephiphany: She "walked for generations carrying many of her in one, when at last she came to a bright river...
...He also mentions—Another first—that Nettie has personally asked Jessie to care for her son...
...When he returns six years later, after completing pharmaceutical school, Ira can't understand why his lather now on his deathbed should hold a grudge...
...The flashback to the couple's courtship that immediately ensues is equally unconvincing...
...Hipbones slung low and easy like a cradle...
...Her fragmented narrative, in addition, precludes logical step-by-step character development...
...it all gives me back good...
...Moreover, "Ira had acquired a certain patience with his mother born of habit and the hope that one day she might discover she was healed...
...Lloyd, who conveniently drops his earlier sexual fixation like a hot potato, proposes nobly—And cryptically: "I never touch a woman mean...
...He enlists prisoners to work his former land, which now belongs to a local chicken farmer, Hap Bailey...
...Nate is writing tombstone epitaphs for the local undertaker, and has become fanatically devoted to Ira, who somehow—we never discover how—reminds him of the disdainful Reverend Staunton...
...Jessie recovers her son, his "eyes squinted with pain, but mouth stretched wide in a sublimely indifferent smile...
...In the same 10 pages Jessie has three daughters by Lloyd, who incidentally loses his sheriff's job to an unnamed rival...
...foggy purpose yields foggy language, a shitting narrative voice, mixed metaphors, broken syntax...
...Suddenly coming upon her in his wanderings, [he] found in his mother a mysterious plaything, endlessly intriguing...
...The local doctor tentatively attributes the problem to typhoid fever, and the section ends strongly suggesting that she is "waiting" to die—And will—fairly soon...
...The climax is a tortured simile: "Nettie's long fingers pull the song from deep inside her memory as if the cow were a bellows, a wind-filled bag instrument that makes this woman's voice...
...Yet contrary to what this exchange might imply, their courtship goes smoothly...
...8.95 Reviewed by Elizabeth Ames_ The trouble with River of Light, Brenda Peterson's novel about north Georgia, is that virtually nothing follows logically from anything...
...At that moment, she knew that "spent from searching his inner worlds, Nate simply had no energy left to work his face...
...No more than lay anythin but clean strong hands on God's land...
...Unfortunately, at the Reverend's, Nate persists in "wandering within his silences," imagining his room lull of wild beasts...
...Nevertheless, he determinedly "settles" Jessie and her three sons in his old farmhouse and finds her a job at the local diner...
...Too bad that in the test of River of Light situations, emotions and language do not mesh nearly so well...
...Nate, Jessie, and Ira attend a Pentacostal meeting where Nate is bitten by a snake, as is Jessie when she tries to come to the rescue...
...his mother dies...
...The scene between them is a supposed turning point, but why he is attracted to Jessie is a mystery...
...Child, you see worlds within your wanderings," exclaims the Reverend...
...Never did see a woman so well fixed as Nettie," he tells his father repeatedly...
...Jessie and sons have moved in with Ira and Lloyd...
...No protagonist emerges as a complete individual, bach has his or her peculiar obsession with—rootlessness, land, babies, religion, etc.—and little else...
...On the other hand, Ira, finds Nate's affection "more maddening than his other step-brothers' neglect," and avoids him like the plague...
...Infuriated when he receives nothing lloyd's will, Ira severs relations with Jessie and goes oil to set up a pharmacy...
...but this resplendent river had not granted her crossing...
...Confusion starts with the book's first, circumlocutory sentence: "Lloyd Sloan had the sympathy of his family in the matter of his wife's barrenness...
...Years before, Jessie fell ill with grief because Luke, her beloved common-law husband, deserted her...
...And making love to Luke Jessie imagines they are moving together, animal-like, up a tree . "together breathing the thin, high air near the top...
...Ira strikes his lather, who also doesn't respond...
...she's a more bookish gal, always had her sights set higher than correspondin with a Sloan...
...There are too many sentences on the order of: " This was the smell he remembered, that humid urgency of the sky...
...He then runs out of the house...
...What we are left with is a string ot unconnected visual motifs—wandering specters, stillbirths, etc...
...Her contribution to Lloyd's dream of improving the farm, now burdened by a second mortgage because of the Depression, consists of milking the two surviving cows...
...Lloyd's father advises, "you got to want a woman for more than jist lingerin tween her legs, son...
...She yearned to follow them...
...This climax is unearned...
...The scene shifts back again...
...Nate prills through...
...Physical appearance and mannerism, helpful clues to character, are seldom described either...
...Just as the old fellow and his wile seem about to die of old age, they are killed in an automobile accident...
...though his father, a dirt farmer, warned him off Nettie Mason...
...One night, after arriving with prisoners, he meets Jessie Walsh, a migrant midwife assisting a childbirth...
...When she walks she's jist rockin along...
...They spoke hungrily, compassionately, the sound of their mortal longings like a lament or lullaby...
...Nettie has delivered several stillbirths...
...In oil-hours, she moonlights at the local mortuary, grooming the dead crones...
...Nettie gets wind of their subsequent affair and, lest there be a dramatic moment, obligingly disappears...
...Nettie May Mason is "a sturdy blonde who had finished two years in a women's college on a religious scholarship" and taught in the local primary school...
...Nettie, not disturbed in the least by their intellectual differences, reads to Lloyd from the Bible and even attempts to imagine him beside her in bed...
...Lloyd, watching her pass his fields "almost every day of his life," falls in love with her walk...
...Ira suddently feels an intense spiritual kinship with the departed Jessie and runs off with a hand ol migrants...
...In the distance, encamped in radiant disarray, was a circle of shapes—wandering specters passing a thousand days together before moving on...
...One explanation may be that the author could not clearly formulate what she wanted to say...
...Again, however, the expectations the author arouses are not borne out...
...One day Jessie appears and informs him that she has passed a correspondence course and established herself as the town beautician during the past year...
...Several themes—wandering memory, birth, death—are invoked but never deeply explored...
...Imaged...
...Ashamed of her vision, probably because it makes no sense, Jessie gives Nate over to stern old Reverend Staunton, who promises to hold the boy "down to earth so he won't fly off, rootless, like you just done...
...She does finally bear a son, Ira, but with great difficulty...
...At the end of the chapter Lloyd tells Ira that Nettie's body—yes, Nettie is dead—is being shipped home to rest, though the circumstances surrounding her fate remain unclear...
...Nettie's illness, it turns out, was un-dulant fever—transmitted by cows—and when cured she remains remote...
...Sophisticated sentiments for a five-year old...
...Heavy and sluggish, she sings to the last surviving cow in present tense, feels the sun in the future subjunctive, remembers school in the past tense—All within about three paragraphs...
...The story then leaps to a time 10 years after their wedding...
...rockin right along...
...She ain't much in your fields...
...The end of River of light is neither the culmination nor the resolution of the preceding events...
...Some nice moments occur between Jessie and her young sons: "In each she smelled the fruit season in which she bore him...
...Lloyd eventually loses his fields to the bank and ultimately is compelled to move to town, where he takes over his uncle's job as sheriff...
Vol. 61 • April 1978 • No. 9
