Specters of Northampton

Brian Kiteley's The River Gods is a novel-in-collage, constructed of monologues delivered by a broad cast of historical and fictional characters drawn from the history of Northampton, Massachusetts. In less than two hundred pages, Kiteley delivers dozens of different speakers covering the eleventh century to the 1990s, including such historical characters as Jonathan Edwards, Richard Nixon, Mike Nichols, Jonathan Edwards, William Carlos Williams, Sojourner Truth, Sylvia Plath, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Alongside these more famous voices are other characters discovered, invented, or else remembered, including some of the novel's most effective characterizations, like that of a teenage girl exploring her sexuality in the 1700s, or else an American soldier lying injured beside his Japanese counterpart until at last he solves "this problem of dying...as though [his] body, which moments ago had been a large complicated knot, was untied with a single firm tug."

A preoccupation with death and dying permeates the book from the beginning: The first death belongs to a high school tailback in the 1970s, and the second to Israel Williams, a lesser-known historical figure who was one of the so-called "river gods," a group of powerful men who once ruled much of this region of Massachusetts in the eighteenth century. Williams is dying in jail while wishing he "believed in ghosts," so that he might catch up with his already-passed wife, Sarah, "hear the news, listen to her wisdom and sense of restraint, and be told where [his] shoes and [his] pipe are." The conjuring of these ghosts—of other river gods, both major and minor—is one of the novel's finest effects. Throughout, Kiteley moves confidently between characters and time periods, creating connections between these many individual lives and also to Northampton itself, the common thread that ties them together even across the many permutations of what Northampton has meant as a place and as a community.

Despite the rich vastness of this historical material, Kiteley is at his best when he's channeling the members of the novel's presumably autobiographically based Kiteley family, including his mother and father, his grandfather, his siblings, and of course some version of himself. In a book mixing fact and fiction at this high a level, it's perhaps fitting that the facts Kiteley is presumably closest to are also the ones that produce the richest fictions: Kiteley's family's story begins with his mother in 1962, shortly after the family's arrival in Northampton, and ends in 1993, with his brother Geoffrey's death from AIDS. One of the book's most affecting passages comes in a section narrated by Kiteley's dying (or perhaps dead) grandfather, who tells Kiteley's fictional self a story about seeing a train stopped upon a set of railroad tracks in the woods years earlier, only to realize he's remembered all the details wrong. "What was the purpose of these easily recognizable flaws in the story?" he wonders, before Kiteley's persona supplies both the answer to the grandfather's question and a key to unlocking the pleasures of this book: "Maybe you wanted to know it was a dream, so you could enjoy the experience more. If it were a pure return to that time, how would you be able to savor the sensations?"

The grandfather narrates his response, saying that

My grandson continues talking, despite having exposed this lovely revelation to me.... He is telling me stories from my past, which he does well now, although he has difficulty keeping straight the fictions he is writing and the facts he has gleaned from my own probably inaccurate stories.

Of course, this "difficulty" in keeping fiction separate from fact and telling accuracy from inaccuracy is part of what's so enjoyable about reading a book like The River Gods, which offers its own well-drawn sensations above and beyond the dry assertions of history. It's worth remembering that even the best histories are a selected story, a greatest hits list of events and places and peoples complicated by varying levels...