Book Review: "Go as a River" by Shelley Read

“Strength, I had learned, was like this littered forest floor, built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.”

- Go as a River by Shelley Read

When it comes to emotionally moving fiction, I am all for it. I love a story that can shatter you but also, manage to make you believe that everything that is happening is real. I think that this is not limited to one country or culture or even time, but realism definitely boosted the want for fiction of this kind. One of the best examples I can think of when it comes to this kind of fiction is The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough and we can all agree that the book, even though it is long, is completely and utterly shattering emotionally. More recently, we have books like Memphis by Tara Stringfellow, The Romantic by William Boyd and even The World and All that it Holds by Aleksandar Hemon. Go as a River is among these texts as really changing your worldview on what realist literature truly looks like.

The main character is a woman who lives in a man's world. It's the USA and its the late 1940s, a time where race relations were not great and other races were not treated anywhere near anything good. So, when our protagonist meets a man named Wilson Moon she becomes enamoured with him but knows she cannot be with him due to the fact he is Native American. They continue their relationship in secret whilst her family life is exploding before her eyes.

Admittedly, her mother died well before this encounter with Wilson Moon as she explains she had to hit all of the female milestones by herself, often feeling a deep sense of shame about them. She lives with a brother she despises and ultimately it will come to the sixties when she finally holds a gun to his head. Until then though, she must put up with his obnoxious behaviour and possible part in a murder.

We also learn about a child who was found by a mother and, through a few secrets, lies come unravelling before his eyes. When the draft for the Vietnam War rolls around, there will be far more things happening to that family which nobody can control from a tired mother with a possibly abusive husband alongside a dead would-be soldier from a drug overdose. A world is shattered to create space for the truth.

In this groundbreaking novel, Shelley Read creates a whole host of varying characters, each who have a history but what is most important to us are the stories of those involved with the main plot. From a longing for love to an abusive household, from a fight over land to death and funerals, this book explores all the boundlessness of the human condition. The only truth being for us is that even in the face of impossibility, we will still try to survive no matter what.

Shelley Read's writing style is not overly sentimental and yet, it has a prosodic quality of being deeply moving, emotional and philosophical. When Pandora opened her jar and all the evil had flown out of it, the only thing left within was hope. This is what I think of the human condition presented in this book - the one thing that makes us human is our ability to feel hope even in hopeless and impossible situations. This is probably best seen in the second part of the novel entitled Wilderness.

All in all, I think that this book is an excellent example of a novel dealing with a large timeline which still manages to retain its mysticism for the characters are each contained within the context of our main characters and therefore, when they do not turn up in places we are worried they are dead. I think that this notion of having such a strong first person narrative is the absolute high point of the novel. It forces the reader to tend to their relationship with the main character and reflect on them.