My second review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge took me on a canoe trip down a wild river in northern Georgia. Although the Cahulawassee River referenced in James Dickey’s Deliverance is fictional, the rapids and the cliffs, the forests and the kudzu are a very real and beautiful part of that country. Both the Coosawattee and Chattooga Rivers claim influence on Dickey’s Cahulawassee, sparkling blue water and white rapids flowing through deep green, hilly country.

The novel starts in the city of Atlanta with Ed Gentry wishing for something fresh and new to take him out of the meaningless rut and routine of his life. He goes to work every day and goes through the motions of making love with his wife, fantasizing about another woman, her “gold eye” looking back at him, “the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.”

Dickey’s language is poetic, his descriptions vibrant, his pace intense, and this book truly is a great American novel. At the beginning of it, I found myself comparing it to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the camaraderie of men traveling together on a new adventure, the narrator idolizing the strong, fearless, adventurous one. Ed’s son is even named Dean, perhaps as some kind of tribute to Dean Moriarty, perhaps a mere coincidence.

But unlike Kerouac’s somewhat pretentious and irresponsible characters, I actually liked Ed Gentry and Lewis Medlock and their buddies, perhaps because they were so real to me, like I knew them and the meaningless routines they were trying to break through.

The river does deliver them from their routine, safe existence into a world of uncertainty and danger, their lives changed forever. One thing that is masterful about Dickey’s language is his sparse use of dialogue, making every conversation count. Their language in the city is structured and citified, sometimes whiny. But once they have made it through the hardest part of their journey, the language changes to something more decisive but informal, like what you would hear in the country. It was as if they had become part of the river and the folk who live there.

And as Ed said in the end, the river would always be with him, no matter what the rest of his life would hold for him.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 6:15 pm and is filed under US and Canada, competetive reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.