Anybody familiar with popular culture in America knows about the Western genre in film and literature. Westward expansion in the 19th century is a reality that is baked into the collective American psyche, for better or worse. The Western genre in entertainment and art uses that as a template for the exploration of themes dealing with the American identity including enterprise, personal responsibility, individuality, freedom, and justice. And guns. Somewhere in the space between the historical westward expansion and the storytelling fantasies that originated in journalistic sensationalism, penny dreadful newspapers, and pulp novels, to films as far back as the silent movie era there is a gap that has been overlooked by purveyors of high and low art. That gap is the less romanticized portrayal of what happened after the westward moving pilgrims settled, particularly those that settled in California. One author that did explore that gap is John Steinbeck. Another is Joan Didion and her first novel, Run River, picks up exactly where John Steinbeck left off.
The connection between Didion and Steinbeck isn’t tenuous; Didion makes sure you get it with direct references thrown right in your face. She mentions the novel In Dubious Battle by name and the land owner Everett McClellan speaks with contempt to his wife Lily about the Okie migrant workers camped out on the edge of their farm. It’s a direct reference to The Grapes of Wrath in which we see the downtrodden fruit pickers from an outsider’s point of view. Lily, whose maiden name is Knight, comes from a lineage of settlers in the Sacramento Valley just like her husband McClellan. The reference to Steinbeck’s East of Eden is just a little too obvious as if Didion is begging you to compare her to that legendary American author. Didion, in a further possible reference to East of Eden, even has an Asian caretaker raising her children who are otherwise almost absent from her life. It’s the kind of stunt a young author pulls in their first novel. These ancestral lines of the Knights and McClellans are important because when Lily’s father, an ex-congressman, dies and the married couple’s connection to their families’ past begins to fade, we see how uprooted they actually are in their time and place.
Lily and Everett live empty lives. Lily is a slut. And she’s shallow. There is no point to saying this in a delicate way. It’s just how she is. She’s easy to get into bed. It’s not that she’s excessively horny or indulgent in her sexuality. It’s just that she has nothing better to do with her life. She has enough money to live comfortably and doesn’t have a strong enough mind to occupy herself with the kinds of intellectual pursuits that would build character. She’s just an emoty dress that gets passed around like a jug of ripple wine at a campfire. There is a profound irony here. Lily isn’t shallow because she isn’t a well-drawn character. Didion is a much better writer than that. Lily is shallow because Didion is a good writer. She creates a shallow protagonist through complexity in her prose. The writing is anything but shallow. In fact, you could say the prose is a little too complex for what Didion is trying to achieve. But it does work well enough to get you inside the empty mind of Lily.
Everett himself isn’t much better. He is a dull person, devoid of intellect or emotion. As a father, he manages the family the way a foreman might run a factory that makes products like toothbrushes or shoelaces, things that he has no emotional investment in. He is a family provider but one that is so emotionally distant from his wife and children that he is little more than an anchor or a hitching post for them. We do learn through the course of the novel that he does feel things like jealousy, shame, guilt, and anger, but he is so cut off from his own emotions that we don’t realize this until he expresses them with his gun.
The novel starts with a gunshot as heard by Lilly as she sits fretting in her bedroom. We don’t learn who got shot until the end of the story. The man who does get shot near the beginning is Ryder Channing. I’d expect anybody with a name like Ryder Channing to be from California, or at least to be a character in a soap opera set in California. I’m just sayin’. Everett murders Channing after catching him having a romp in the bushes by the river with Lilly. Throughout most of the story, even though Everett is emotionally dead, he doesn’t show any signs of being homicidal. So here the plot is set in place to be about how Everett came to the point of murdering this man. It almost starts with the feeling of a murder mystery albeit one in which the mystery is not who committed the murder but why did so.
Ryder Channing sees himself as a visionary entrepreneur. He schemes up big plans for business ventures that are guaranteed for success. Of course, all he needs to get started is money...other peoples’ money to be exact. His sales pitches are successful and he attracts a lot of investors and women too. But his businesses never succeed in getting off the ground and he maintains his luxurious lifestyle by skimming off the investments. Ryder isn’t exactly a grifter; it’s just that he is immature and not very responsible.
Ryder Channing has designs on Martha McClellan, Everett’s sister. The McClellan siblings have a curious relationship. There are heavy suggestions of an incestuous attachment. If the two haven’t actually slept with each other, there certainly is a desire between them that hangs heavy over the narrative. Martha is insanely jealous of Lily which is complicated by the detail that the two women both live in the McClellan mansion near the bank of the Sacramento River. They manage to get along though, especially because the children have a good relationship with Martha in the absence of Lily’s emotional support. As the story progresses though, Martha’s behavior becomes erratic and unpredictable. When she drowns in the river, we can’t be certain if it is a suicide or not. Martha is in the middle of all this because she had been planning to marry Ryder Channing, but the arrangements were called off partly because Everett didn’t approve of the marriage. Considering that Ryder and Lily were growing closer to having an affair before Martha’s death, it is easy to see how the history between the two men climaxes with Everett shooting Ryder after he discovers him post-coitus with Lily on the river bank.
After the suspicious death of Martha, Everett is driven further into despair because a powerful development corporation is planning to buy the Knight and McClellan properties. The intention is to turn the inherited agricultural land into suburban housing tracts. The businessmen are like turkey vultures circling the shack of a nearly dead man. This element of capitalist predation even further represents separation from the weakening ancestral roots put down by Lily and Everett’s families. Even worse, Ryder and others who live nearby are in on this real estate scheme because the pursuit of money means more to them than quality of life. This all builds up to the ending gunshot Lily hears in the first sentence of the novel.
All the pieces fit together making a clear and coherent picture. Unfortunately, the prose doesn’t do it justice. Didion’s writing is choppy and stilted a lot of the time. It doesn’t flow as it should. Some of the run-on sentences go on so long that it becomes difficult to follow what she is saying. At other times, the prose is difficult to pay attention to. It is the kind of writing that makes more sense after you finish reading it than during the reading process.
Another shortcoming is her use of the river as a metaphor. The river is a source of life for the farming community that lives on its banks. They obviously settled there because they needed water for irrigation. It is also a place of death since so many people die in or near the river during the course of the narrative. Also it represents a line of demarcation that cuts the communities off from the world outside the valley. This is especially important as a line that separates the people migrating from the east from those that stopped migrating and settled on the western bank. But a river is supposed to flow and the stream of ancestry that leads up to the marriage of Lily and Everett comes to a dead halt as their lives and relationship reaches the end. But Didion doesn’t emphasize the metaphor of the river with the strength she could have. Its meaning is obscure and should have been developed further to completion.
Like Finnegans Wake, Run River begins where it ends and ends where it begins, occupying a limbo between fantasies of the Old West and more contemporary fantasies of California as the land where dreams come true. Joan Didion t makes the farm lands in the Sacramento Valley arid and inhospitable. She writes about the people that way too. While the meaning of Run River is legitimate, the story is average and the writing unpolished. It does set the tone for her later and better works though. If those other novels had never been written, this one would have faded into obscurity. It’s not a great book, but if you’re inclined to see where the author of Play It As It Lays started off, it is worth reading once.
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