... Peter Heller has struck gold again with The River ... Masterfully paced and artfully told, The River is a page turner that demands the reader slow down and relish the sheer poetry of the language ... Though stories of man versus nature date back to the Odyssey, The River thrills as Heller invites his characters to confront their own mortality without losing sight of the deep connections between humans and their environment.
Initially [the book] reads as slightly puritanical — drunks are bad, fat people are dumb, Jack and Wynn are handsome and good at everything — but this tendency reverses so completely and shockingly at the end that it can almost, but not quite, knock any smugness from a reader ... The real delight is the nature writing. The River is a fiction addition to the New Landscape writing of Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, prose so vivid and engaging that a city-dwelling reviewer can feel the clammy cold of a fog over a river or the heat of subterranean tree roots burning underfoot in the aftermath of a fire. Heller... has an extraordinary facility for describing topography and vegetation; we can feel the sharpness of the rocks and the trilling excitement of the river as it approaches rapids. He brilliantly describes the physical process of wild living ... There is a tendency toward status-flagging in this novel ... This social positioning tempers the peril a little, making the boys seem like adventure-tourists who could have done something else with their academic sabbaticals. But none of that really affects the utter joy contained in this book, which is a suspenseful tale told with glorious drama and lyrical flair.
... [Heller] leans into the thriller aspect of the tale, with gripping results ... Former Outside magazine editor Heller puts his knowledge of canoeing and currents to fascinating use. He has created indelible characters in Wynn and Jack, pals who are almost exact opposites...
Heller (Celine, 2017) once again chronicles life-or-death adventure with empathy for the natural world and the characters who people it. He writes most mightily of the boys’ friendship and their beloved, uncompromising wilderness, depicting those layers of life that lie far beyond what is more commonly seen: the fire’s unapologetic threats, the wisdom of the birds and animals seeking their own safety, and the language of the river itself.
... poetic and unnerving ... The River is a slim book – just over 250 pages – but it is full of rushing life and profound consequences ... the result is a novel that sweeps you away, each page filled with wonder and awe for a natural world we can quantify with science but can rarely predict with emotion. And if Heller’s characters sometimes lack subtlety, they make up for it in their ability to convey tenderness, a fundamental lack in far too many of us.
... partly an ode to the Northern wilderness, partly a survival how-to, and mostly a thriller — suspenseful and gut-wrenching ... Heller dives deep into the details of wilderness camping — so deep that sometimes you just want to jump ahead and find out what happens. Likewise with his acute and poetic observations of nature. But he is setting the scene and establishing two likable and memorable characters in Wynn and Jack. Each brings a different perspective to the violence and tragedy they encounter.
Heller confidently manages a host of tensions...his pacing is masterful as well, briskly but calmly capturing the scenery in slower moments, then running full-throttle and shifting to barreling prose when danger is imminent ... though the tale is a familiar one of fending off the deadliness of the wilderness and one's fellow man, Heller has such a solid grasp of nature (both human and the outdoors) that the storytelling feels fresh and affecting. In bringing his characters to the brink of death (and past it), Heller speaks soberly to the random perils of everyday living ... An exhilarating tale delivered with the pace of a thriller and the wisdom of a grizzled nature guide.
Jack and Wynn may be too well-rounded to be entirely believable. Their motivations are convincing, however, especially when nature’s violence rekindles Jack’s memories of his mother’s accidental death years earlier. Maia, conversely, can at times feel more like a plot device than like a woman with an inherently dramatic story of her own. Nevertheless, with its evocative descriptions of nature’s splendor and brutality, Heller’s novel beautifully depicts the powers that can drive humans apart—and those that compel them to return repeatedly to one another.
