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Photo illustration by John Kehe |
River gothic
In her new novel 'The River Wife,' Jonis Agee serves up a steaming dish of Southern melodrama and gorgeous prose
By Yvonne Zippfrom the July 24, 2007 edition
By Jonis Agee
Random House
393 pp., $24.95
Page 1 of 2
Teenage brides in literature aren't exactly known for their ability to pick men, but Hedie Rails Ducharme is soon to find out that happy endings in Jacques Landings, Mo., are just about as scarce as ivory-billed woodpeckers. Despite her husband's penchant for buying her fancy shoes, Hedie is no Cinderella and actually ends up having more than a few things in common with Bluebeard's wife.
Clement is always being called away at 2 a.m. on errands Hedie's not allowed to inquire about. ("What business needed to be done in the middle of the night?") And, the pregnant 17-year-old soon discovers, the family's riverfront mansion is stuffed with the tragic histories of 100 years' worth of "river wives." There's even a secret room – this one stuffed with buried treasure rather than murdered women, although there's room for at least one corpse.
Pirates, the legacy of slavery, natural history, romance, and Southern Gothic tradition combine in Jonis Agee's atmospheric new novel, The River Wife, set in a small town so isolated "it's as if the whole state of Missouri has been trying to shake it off for years, like a vestigial tail."
Annie Lark is the first river wife to get mixed up with the Ducharmes, although in fairness, she was half-paralyzed and in danger of drowning. During the 1811 earthquake that flattened Missouri, a house fell on the girl, pinning her to her bed. In a touching display of parental loyalty, her mother and father run away and leave her there without any food or water – except for the river that had flooded its banks and is creeping toward the ruined cabin. Jacques Ducharme, a fur trader, rescues Annie and nurses her until her legs heal, and in gratitude, she becomes his common-law wife.
Their first years together are happy, until Jacques' ambition causes him to take up inn-keeping – along with a few other lucrative hobbies including piracy, slavery, and dog-fighting. (Annie won't live long enough to see it, but Jacques is just getting started. It takes the Civil War to truly bring out his ruthlessness.) "In her short life, Annie had learned that men spent all their time either building or breaking – things, animals, people. Without one to occupy them, they'd turn to the other." This truism leads to a horrible accident that destroys what's left of the couple's tenderness for each other.
Annie is the novel's anchor, and once she has been submerged in tragedy, "The River Wife" starts to drift. It takes a while for a reader to notice, since Agee (author of "Sweet Eyes") is known for her poetic style, and the prose certainly doesn't disappoint.
Take this passage describing Jacques Landing as Hedie first sees it during the Great Depression: "Cotton fibers floated in the air, rising and settling again, as if on an invisible tide rinsing over the town. They caught in the screens of doors and windows, settled uncovered dishes of beans and cornbread and fresh tomatoes, and clung to your tongue when you tried to talk, so you constantly found yourself licking every syllable as if it were part of a filthy word as you scraped your tongue against your front teeth and swallowed."
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