Lee Martin’s “River of Heaven” begins with a promising epigraph, a Chinese proverb warning us that “Even brothers should keep careful accounts.”
The brothers in question are Sam Brady, the narrator of the story, and his older brother, Cal. Sam and Cal grew up in the 1950s, in the small town of Mount Gilead, Ill. They were close, until Cal figured out that Sam “walked on the wrong side of the tracks when it came to the baby-oh-baby” — that Sam was gay, in other words. Since then, the siblings have kept clear of each other.
Sam has never gotten over the violent death of his close childhood friend Dewey, a death that seemed like suicide at the time. He has remained in Mount Gilead, leading a lonely, furtive life, running a janitorial service, keeping a succession of basset hounds.
Cal has drifted away from their hometown, bounced around, staying on the fringes of the law, all but lost to his younger brother. Until one day Sam turns on CNN and watches a hostage drama heroically resolved by Cal.
Cal, of course, comes back to Mount Gilead, on the run from the fallout of the hostage crisis (which is more complicated then it appears), looking for a place to hide. The story of Dewey’s death is picked up again, by Sam’s troubled conscience and by the efforts of a freshman reporter with the cringe- inducing name of Duncan Hines.
And here the careful accounts of Sam and Cal, their versions of what happened to Dewey, are each shown to be evasive and self-serving in their own ways. Without giving away too much of the mystery, Dewey’s death, like Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” becomes a crime in which almost everyone around is complicit.
Martin describes the day of Dewey’s death with great vividness and restraint. We see the policeman whose job it is to break the news to Dewey’s family rehearsing his speech on the family’s neighbors. His awful mission is recounted as the narrator overhears it from next door: the turning off of the then- ubiquitous radio, the shocked silence, the collective howl.
The way in which the unresolved traumas of childhood can pursue us even to the end of our lives is one of the central subjects of “River of Heaven.” The best parts of this book describe the narrow choices these damaged people face in old age. Of Sam’s neighbor, a retired sailor whose wife has just died, the narrator reflects, with Larkinesque bleakness:
“Now, here we are, Arthur and I, each of us afraid to admit we’ve reached the age when our circumstances — this widower, this secret auntie — sweep us, scared to death, into our last years.”
It almost seems like this dour picture becomes too much for the writer. For comic relief, he surrounds Sam with characters that are broad caricatures: Arthur, like Popeye, talks most entirely in nautical terms, such as “walk the planks,” “shipshape,” “permission to come aboard.” The brassy Very Vera, a radio personality with a cooking school for the elderly, concludes each recipe with a flourish and a flamenco stomp. The dweebish cub reporter Hines pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
Even by the standards of a small town in which it’s difficult to find two people who are not connected in some way, the coincidences in “River of Heaven” are numerous and unlikely. Like characters in a soap opera, the characters in Mount Gilead are interlinked by dark secrets, for no other reason than that the novelist needs to tie up loose ends. A movie-of-the- week subplot featuring a white-supremacist group revolves around the search for a rare gold-plated Coke glass that just happens to turn up in Sam’s basement.
Worse, the novel descends into a kind of wish-fulfillment universe in which cowards outsmart trained gunmen, life’s strays and orphans unite to form happy ad hoc families, all mysteries are explained and all conflicts resolved. In this fictional world, not only do we make peace with the dead, but they ease our transition into the afterlife; near the end of the novel the narrator muses, without irony:
“I like to think the spirits of the dead keep watch for us, and when the time comes to join them, they shine a light to carry us across the river of heaven.”
Could be. As a better writer said in another context: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
John Broening is a freelance writer in Denver.
Fiction
River of Heaven, by Lee Martin, $24
