The River

“The clarity of the air was like putting on magnifying glasses: every trunk of every birch tree seemed to stand out against the backdrop of tamarack, of spruce, and there were touches of yellow at the edges of the limbs, and some of the tamarack needles were the faded colors of fall grass. The pink fireweed along the shore beneath the trees popped as in a painting.”

This highly imagistic passage demonstrates Heller’s talent for lyrical prose. Many of the settings in the book take on a colorful visual aspect, which lends a cinematic effect to the narrative.

“They saw the moose standing at the edge of the woods watching, and he seemed forlorn, as if he wanted to join them. He had clearly never seen a human before.”

The description of the moose here indicates the remoteness of the wildness of the setting. The moose isn’t afraid, suggesting a lack of experience with humans, a world unspoiled by human interference and conquest.

“Wynn was crazy about Goldsworthy, the environmental sculptor, and was in awe of the ethic of ephemeral art, from Buddhist sandpainting to the sapling moons of Jay Mead. The untethering of ego: the purity of creating something that wouldn’t even be around to sign in a matter of hours or days. What that said about ownership and the impermanence of all things.”

This passage further characterizes Wynn. His appreciation and crafting of art for the sake of expression reveals that he’s more interested in the deeper aspects of life, such as creating meaning. He tends to be sensitive, as this quote conveys.

“For Jack, stuff like cold and hunger didn’t have a value, good or bad, they just were, and it was best if they didn’t last that long; but if they did, as long as one survived them, no harm, no foul.”

This passage again provides characterization, this time of Jack. The narrative highlights Jack’s matter-of-fact outlook. He accepts the circumstances of his surroundings and implicitly understands that some things are entirely out of his control; therefore, he has a more stoic mindset than his friend and tends to assert control over things that he feels can be controlled.

“Few people had the luck to die in the prime of life in full appreciation of all the goodness therein. Leave it at that, he thought. As good a place as any.”

The narrative reveals that Jack’s mother lost her life in a horse-riding accident. After Jack spends some time reflecting on the incident, he shuts his thoughts off by reminding himself that his mother died doing what she enjoyed. This is a rationalization of death that, like many, Jack evidently used in coping with the loss of his mother when he was a boy.

“Professor Paulson said alliteration was dangerous if you don’t know how to use it.”

Wynn says this to Jack while they’re discussing literature and the craft of writing. Jack later questions what the professor’s definition of danger might be, thus suggesting a contrasting irony given that Jack and Wynn face real danger rather than a perceived danger in which no real physical harm can occur.

“Now they were having fun and laughing with the voracious brookies and letting every fish go.”

This passage depicts an idyllic experience that juxtaposes the events about to transpire. At the moment, Jack and Wynn are still on a wilderness trip, and even though a forest fire burns nearby, they’re still outfitted with everything they need to finish their trip. They don’t need the fish, so they release them. This is the last moment of enjoyment the two have on the trip.

“The man had clearly been injured and upset, almost in shock. Some accident had happened, Wynn just wasn’t sure what, and the man Pierre had missed her in the fog somehow.”

Wynn is far less reactive than Jack, as his thoughts in this passage illustrate. He has a hard time believing and accepting that Pierre would have tried to kill his wife and wants to believe in the good of humanity rather than its worst.

“Jack, who had grown up on a ranch, held little stigma for bodily functions and no patience for squeamishness.”

This characterization explores how Jack responds to his immediate environment. He’s at home in the rugged wilderness where civilized etiquette has no place. In this way, Jack is much more in tune with his primal origins than is Wynn.

“She needed rest and they needed to get down the river to the village at the mouth of the bay.”

After discovering Maia, Jack and Wynn must continuously try to strike a balance between making sure that she’s stable and escaping the fire. Along with the prospect that Pierre could be waiting to ambush them, this provides much of the novel’s suspense.

“Berry-picking was like throwing a Frisbee around, or taking a walk up the orchard road, or jumping into the lake and then lying on the sun-warmed stones. It was an achievement-free zone, which Wynn was coming to realize is where most of his joy happened. Making constructions on the riverbank was the same.”

This passage again depicts Wynn’s temperament. He thrives best outside the confines of societal expectations. Wynn prefers opportunities to engage in activities simply for the sake of engaging in them—rather than for the sake of adherence to a norm.

“She had not said more than one word yet, so they didn’t know. Jack didn’t know either but he was forming a theory. He was gathering evidence and he would indict and convict the man before they even met him again. Wynn wouldn’t. It was plausible.”

The narrative here shows Jack’s and Wynn’s contrasting perceptions and outlooks regarding what happened to Maia. It also highlights a contrast in the personalities of the two. Jack is much more cognizant of his surroundings and is willing to avoid legal theories such as “innocent until proven guilty” if it means he’ll survive. Wynn is more deliberate and doesn’t relinquish his core beliefs.

“They needed as many calories as they could get and they could not afford to pass them up. Jack had read the accounts. Of the expeditions that failed, that starved to death, that cannibalized, that lost their lives to cold and hunger. Of the kid who went into the wild and could not gather enough food and lost himself to encroaching lethargy and maybe poisonous berries.”

This passage indirectly references Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild, which documents the life of Chris McCandless and his decision to leave society in favor of a life of solitude in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer speculates that McCandless died because he ate poisonous vegetation that he mistook for something else. Jack stocks up on blueberries to avoid making a similar mistake.

“Wynn would bet all his chips on goodness. It wasn’t even a bet, was it? It was no decision at all. Like the fish who had no idea what water was: Wynn swam in it. The universe cradled him, it cradled all beings, everything would work out. Beings suffered, that sucked; he himself suffered, it certainly sucked; but step back far enough and take the long view and everything would take care of itself.”

This is Jack’s assessment of Wynn’s personality. The narrative purpose here is to not only draw distinctions between Jack and Wynn but also justify what happens toward the end of the novel. Wynn’s adamant belief in goodness is what ultimately costs him his life.

“With everything seeming to fall apart, good habits were one thing to hold on to.”

Both Jack and Wynn adhere to this wisdom. Focusing on the minutiae of routine helps keep Wynn and Jack from acting out of panic, which could cause them to make a terrible mistake. They’re in a hyper-state of stress, exacerbated by fatigue, so their focus on routine helps them quiet their nerves to some degree.

“If one concentrated on one thing and then another—the good things in each moment—the fear wrapped deep in the gut seemed to unswell, like an iced bruise. Still there, but quieter.”

Like the previous quote, this passage highlights the importance of staying in the present. Fully submerging their minds into the present moment helps them keep their anxiety contained, fosters a sense of composure, and enables them to focus on doing what they need to do in order to survive.

“It pierced the haze and echoed off the waiting forest and rolled over the water like any scream, and seemed to carry a pathos so deep it was a wonder a mere world could support it.”

As previously noted, Heller often turns lyrical when describing the setting. Here, he describes the cry of a loon, and the auditory sense is imbued with a higher order of being.

“They buried their faces between the cobbles in inches of water and they felt a wind like some demonic thing, like nothing on earth, a searing gust that pummeled the canoe, they could hear the burning wood flail against it, the tick of embers, they were lying in water heads down in the ice runnels between stones and could not help but hear the passing over of hell.”

This passage describes how Jack, Wynn, and Maia manage to survive the firestorm. The language is dramatic, and that hell passes over them suggests an inversion of how hell is typically perceived. It’s normally a place that’s subterranean, but here it’s descending upon them and the surrounding forest.

“Jack looked around and thought that the Inferno was not credible: not because the details of Hell were beyond the pale—they were—but because of the unshakable equanimity of Virgil.”

This quote refers to Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Virgil is the Roman poet who guides Dante through the circles of hell. As Jack attempts to enable the three to survive the forest fire, he considers that Virgil’s composure is impossible given the nature of the inferno that is hell.

“The earth stripped to its geography did not feel like home.”

After surviving the fire, Jack and Wynn observe the alien landscape. The verdant forest is now destroyed, and they feel as though they’re no longer in a familiar place.

“The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. It was like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.”

Jack’s observations here clearly express how he values the natural world. The ways that animals sense the fire and flee it—including the trout, who move to the deeper water of the river from the shallow tributaries—impress upon him a sense of wonder, and he thinks this hints at a broader kind of intelligence than humans are capable of understanding.

“Wynn imagined, as he had before, that the water and the stars might sing to each other in a key inaudible, usually, to the human ear. But probably you could hear it. Sometimes. If you quieted the pulse of your own blood. A rhythmic keening at the edge of sound. Wynn thought that if wolves sang, and coyotes, and elk and birds, and wind, and we, too, it was probably in response to a music we didn’t know we could hear.”

Wynn again turns metaphysical here as he considers the possibility that life is guided by an unseen order. However, since humans are part of this order, like other animals, we can access its secrets if we train ourselves to do so.

“There’s a certain stillness before dawn. A caesura. The fire was a heap of dusted embers. No wind. In the lacuna between outbreath and inbreath even the owl hushed.”

This passage subtly turns the focus away from the relief of survival back toward more danger, as the inbreath/outbreath image symbolizes. The scene conveys suspense, a pause before the unexpected next turn of events.