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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
from the July 24, 2007 edition
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Agee has a tendency to pound the foreshadowing chords a little too forcefully ("[Annie] sometimes worried that they were living on the borrowed goodness of the future, and like borrowed salt, it could never be returned without bad luck."), but the real problem is that she floats too close to the surface with the other river wives.
Omah, an orphaned black girl who joins Jacques' band of river pirates, has tremendous presence and the potential to walk off with the plot neatly spitted on her Bowie knife. "The real problem was, she herself had had more adventures and committed more crimes than any character in a mere novel," Omah thinks later in life, after finding that works like "Madame Bovary can't hold her interest."
Unfortunately, readers only get a taste of these – mostly in flashback. Agee cuts away from her too quickly, instead dividing her time between Jacques' mercenary second wife, Laura, who only needed to toss her head and say "Fiddle-dee-dee" to make the resemblance to Scarlett O'Hara complete, and her daughter, Maddie.
Meanwhile, during the Great Depression, Hedie's plot matter-of-factly trots toward tragedy. After the war, murders, maulings, fires, and voodoo of the 19th century, the inevitability of misery winning again starts to feel a little tiring. Also, Clement lacks the presence of his grandfather, despite his gangster status. "Even farming, he was a neat man, clean, almost prissy with his scrubbed nails. He cleaned his teeth nightly with salt and a slick of river-willow bark he would slide between each of the small pegged points. You have child's teeth, I would tell him a few weeks after the wedding."
Fans of Southern Gothic will still find "The River Wife" a savory gumbo of melodrama and beautiful writing. Jacques himself is suitably larger-than-life and Agee makes it seem entirely plausible that the old rascal could overshadow everyone else for 70 years. (What she never makes clear is why or when insatiable greed became the defining characteristic of a man who seemed sincerely in love with his crippled wife.) The supernatural elements of the story that pop up periodically come to seem as unnecessary as the cameo by naturalist John James Audobon – a few intriguing pages that ultimately get swept aside.
Greed and lust ultimately drive the tragedies in "The River Wife" far more effectively than any mere ghost could.
• Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.
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