Go as a River: A Novel

The novel portrays the pain of grief as something that decays and fragments a person’s life if they are not willing to “go as a river” and grow despite their losses. When Wil arrives for the first time at the Nash farm, Victoria is suddenly embarrassed by its state of decay. She realizes that the farm has fallen into disrepair since her mother’s death, noting that “the evidence stood before us like a final proclamation of my family’s fall” (21). Her father lets his grief over his wife’s death fester inside him, becoming increasingly weaker until he dies of a lung collapse. Similarly, Ruby-Alice isolates herself from the world after the loss of her family. When Victoria relocates and is stricken with the loss of her hometown and family, she finally realizes “how much [she] resembled Ruby-Alice sleeping night after night on the sofa” (208), and this thought compels her to buy new sheets and sleep in the bedroom, symbolically accepting her new home and beginning the long process of creating a new life for herself.

Victoria’s journey through grief is guided by Wil’s words of wisdom, which she eventually grows to understand and live by. Like a river, which moves forward despite encountering many obstacles, Victoria embraces the rhythm of her life rather than becoming stuck in her grief. Her first recognition of this occurs when she leaves her home in Iola to give birth to her baby in the wilderness. When she uses her full name, Victoria, to sign her goodbye letter to her father, she realizes that “it was Torie who lacked the wherewithal to rise and move forward, but Victoria—Wil’s Victoria—had a woman’s strength to go on” (109). In the moment when she saves Lukas by leaving him in the parked car, she again calls on her power of movement, stating, “I kept moving. I ran away to the woods, made preparations, gave birth, stayed alive. Sorrow tried but did not claim me” (140). Victoria again demonstrates this forward way of thinking when she accepts the government’s offer for her farm and makes bold plans to save the peach trees. She realizes that Iola only holds grief for her, and she is willing to move on from it. This ability to move forward through grief eventually leads her to her reunion with her son Lukas, whom she sees as sharing this same trait. Regarding her grown son for the first time, she reflects that he is “not a boy at all but a man who had known loss and loneliness and war yet had summoned the courage to arrive here to meet me” (301).

The novel’s geographical and historical setting is inextricable from the US history of colonial invasion and the ongoing disputes regarding the management and development of the Colorado River Basin. The novel uses Victoria’s striking narration to create a brutally honest characterization of the townspeople and to depict the casual injustices perpetrated against Indigenous people by the closed-minded attitudes of the white community around her. Despite having grown up with the people of Iola, Victoria is infuriated by their racist behavior toward Wil, and this development leads her to distrust them and to retreat to the wilderness in order to ensure the safety of her child. In hindsight, she reflects on the erasure of the Ute tribe’s mistreatment in the community, noting that “Most folks I’d known tended to think of the Utes with disdain or disregard or, most commonly, not at all” (218-19). Victoria’s frank retrospection on various token efforts to repair the historical injustices against the Ute people, such as the renaming of the wild region of the San Juan mountains with a Ute word, “Uncompahgre,” reveals her sharp critique of the weak and toothless nature of such belated attempts to make amends. Victoria imagines Wil’s criticism of this act of renaming, asserting that he would believe it to be “an ironic and insufficient attempt at redemption” (300). Amidst this larger political backdrop, Victoria’s personal grief causes her to relive the painful experience of Wil’s loss, carrying the legacy of his memory throughout the novel’s decade-spanning events. Through the mode of historical fiction and first-person narration, the novel therefore explores the complex ramifications that painful aspects of history have for individual lives.

The violence of racism is embedded in the novel through the inciting event of the hate crime of Wil’s brutal murder, and the narration boldly continues to examine the blatant lack of justice for this crime. Wil is falsely accused by an unofficial officer of the law whose very authority represents a legacy of colonialist invasion, for he owes his position to the fact that his ancestors built one of the biggest houses in town. Ezra Martindell’s racist and unverified claim of Wil’s thievery, and his incitement to violence through the posting of a reward for a “dangerous” criminal, leads Forrest Davis to capture and brutally murder Wil. In the aftermath of this violence, Victoria laments the institutional injustice of US law, emphasizing the fact that civil rights were nonexistent for Indigenous people, and Read uses the motif of the river to tie these historical injustices to the personal experiences of grief and fragmented identity. In hindsight, Victoria sees all the lives touched by this violent act as historically negligible, for she states, “My revenge, and the only justice Wil would ever receive, would lie in Seth’s haunting and the day the Gunnison River would rise to erase it all” (189). The pain of racism also shapes Lukas’s identity, for he grows up without a father and is separated from his mother due to the threats of bigotry and violence. The impact of these historical injustices on Victoria and Lukas’s future relationship is encapsulated in the unresolved ending in which they will meet for the first time. Appropriately, Victoria views this meeting as “a reckoning with the past before turning to the future” (299). The novel therefore demonstrates the complex legacy of colonization and racism by depicting the characters’ physical displacement and the pain of their fragmented relationships and identities. Such fragmentation is never fully resolved; instead, the only form of resolution to be found is portrayed as an ongoing process of reflection and recovery.