Book review: Go as a River by Shelley Read

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)

Picking up a book that is meant to be the next big thing, the next Lessons in Chemistry or Where the Crawdads Sing or Still Life, is always a little fraught.

You want to believe with all your literary-loving heart that the novel will be every bit as good as advertised, but there’s always this sneaking suspicion that it could all be hyped-up smoke and mirrors, with everyone caught in some sort of word-shaped “The Emperor’s New Clothes” delusion.

Thankfully in the case of Go as a River by Shelley Read, and indeed the other three books cited, storytelling substance well and truly triumphs over hype with the author delivering a tale so compellingly human and richly alive that it’s impossible not to irrevocably drawn into the bucolically tragic but tenaciously hopeful world of Victoria Nash.

Brought up near the now-drowned town of Iola Colorado – the town, along with two neighbouring urban locales fell beneath the waters of the Blue Mesa Reservoir in 1966, their existence deemed secondary in value to the hydroelectricity the damning of the Gunnison River would create – Victoria, or Torie as she’s known as a child to family and friends, does not have the most idyllic of existence.

On paper at least, she should; her parents’ peach tree farm in the pine-clad realms of the Colorado countryside is renowned for the quality of its fruit and the faithfulness of the family is tending to a legacy that began back with her grandfather who planted the trees in defiance of all local convention.

No matter how many years passed, I saw them: Wil on the fringes of the orchard, waiting for me, reaching his hand out to mind; Daddy among the shaggy trees, expertly twisting a peach from its hold; Mother tending the kitchen garden, gathering fresh greens for supper; Cal calling to me from out tree house as it it hadn’t long ago fallen to ruin; Aunt Viv and Uncle Ogden, both still so full of life, sneaking kisses on the front porch. There had been promise and love in this place once. One by one those hopes had perished.

Hers should have been a life of rural bliss, but beset almost crushing family tragedy, familial dynamics that see her treated as a beast of burden more than a daughter to be loved, and the meeting with a stranger when she’s seventeen which changes her life completely, it turns out to be anything but.

Her response to the kinds of events that would sink most of us without a trace is to plug doggedly on; in one sense, she doesn’t have much choice – the farm needs tending, and her father and brother and crippled uncle need feeding and no one or nothing is going to simply let her follow her heart.

But as events in this stunningly well-written but richly emotionally accessible story unfold – Go as a River is that rare novel indeed that is so beautifully written with such riveting turns of phrase that you have to stop almost every paragraph to savour its luxurious use and love of words and the sparkling insights contained within, and yet, it feels groundedly and affecting down to earth every step of the way – it becomes apparent to Victoria that she needs to heed the words of that stranger and let her life “go as a river”.

In other words, give into the flow and navigate as best you can the dangerous eddies and shoals to reach those places where the sailing is easy and you are taken to good and well-deserved places.

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)

For much of Go as a River Victoria is simply hanging on for dear life, on more than one occasion, quite literally.

She has to navigate changes of fortune that come at her at an almost blisteringly intense rate, and she could be forgiven for simply giving up, too overwhelmed to do more than sink into the slough of despond that her life could too easily have become.

But Victoria, as she demands to be known as an adult, a way of drawing a line between the pain of the past and the hard-fought optimism of the present and future, keeps fighting every step of the way, not in some militant way but in the way many people do when they have no choice but to out one foot in front of the other.

She bends into the flow of her life, both the good and the bad, reasoning that out of the terrible moments something good must come as indeed it does; not in some fairytale way because if nothing else, Go as a River is as real as a novel gets, its hard kernels of life truth brought alive by its luminously lovely writing, but in that way that acknowledges how tough things can be but that that doesn’t mean something wonderful can’t emerge from it too.

There is something compelling about the idea of leaning into life, but as Go as a River goes on, into also going against the tide and seeing where that might take you too.

I started down the long driveway, trying not to look back. But I couldn’t do it. I parked the truck and got out to take one long, final look at the place that made me. Then I returned to the truck and kept on driving. I would leave my past behind and try to build my life again, hoping not for miracles but simply for strength in new soil. I figured that if my trees could survive, uprooted and against the odds, well, damn all bad fortune, so too could I.

That’s the eventual place that the ebbs and flows of life take Victoria too.

Someone who remains curiously open to life, love and connection even as the very worst aspects of being human are visited upon her, Victoria eventually comes to a place where she has to actively own where her life goes to next.

She is so traumatised by the tragic events of her past that it’s all too easy for her to surrender to their overwhelming emotional power, and heeding the stranger’s advice she does just that, but she also must heed the other facet of that truism that going with the flow also involves taking active steps to steer where you end up.

Flow is one thing, and it can take you places you don’t want to go, but it can also be used to your advantage and as the book comes to the kind of ending that feels real, heartfelt and thoroughly well-earned, Victoria must decide whether she will let the flow wholly dictate her journey or whether she will work with it to her own advantage.

Go as a River is a gem, a gloriously all-enveloping book that’s rich in the highs and lows of the human condition, that understands how terrible things can be but how lovely they can be too, and that while the flow cannot be fought against sometimes, and you simply have to go with it, there comes a time when your decisions can steer you to better places and you must fight then to temper the flow and take life where your heart, your broken heart in need of healing, needs to go.

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