The River
... Peter Heller has struck gold again with The River ... Masterfully paced and artfully told, The River is a page turner that demands the reader slow down and relish the sheer poetry of the language ... Though stories of man versus nature date back to the Odyssey, The River thrills as Heller invites his characters to confront their own mortality without losing sight of the deep connections between humans and their environment.
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Initially [the book] reads as slightly puritanical — drunks are bad, fat people are dumb, Jack and Wynn are handsome and good at everything — but this tendency reverses so completely and shockingly at the end that it can almost, but not quite, knock any smugness from a reader ... The real delight is the nature writing. The River is a fiction addition to the New Landscape writing of Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, prose so vivid and engaging that a city-dwelling reviewer can feel the clammy cold of a fog over a river or the heat of subterranean tree roots burning underfoot in the aftermath of a fire. Heller... has an extraordinary facility for describing topography and vegetation; we can feel the sharpness of the rocks and the trilling excitement of the river as it approaches rapids. He brilliantly describes the physical process of wild living ... There is a tendency toward status-flagging in this novel ... This social positioning tempers the peril a little, making the boys seem like adventure-tourists who could have done something else with their academic sabbaticals. But none of that really affects the utter joy contained in this book, which is a suspenseful tale told with glorious drama and lyrical flair.
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... [Heller] leans into the thriller aspect of the tale, with gripping results ... Former Outside magazine editor Heller puts his knowledge of canoeing and currents to fascinating use. He has created indelible characters in Wynn and Jack, pals who are almost exact opposites...
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