My Life in the North Woods by Robert Smith (review)

Reviews 267 bittersweetness, it ends in divorce, both of the couple and from the stream. More journalistically, Terrence Des Pres investigates the instant mythology caused by the death of writer John Gardner. Western writers abound: Barry Lopez, Brenda Peterson, William Kittredge . If these varied selections are any indication, there are a good many essayists out there rendering their lives into seamless marriages of wisdom and art. PETER WILD The University of Arizona My Life in the North Woods. By Robert Smith. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. 328 pages, $17.95.) Robert Smith’s My Life in the North Woods is really two books in one. Unfortunately, in this case, two books for the price of one is not especially good news. The first book is a memoir recounting the winter during the Great Depression when Smith, at age eighteen, was forced to leave college and go to work as a clerk in a Maine lumber camp. The second book isa murder mystery —still nonfiction—which is set in the Maine woods and stars the characters whom Smith has introduced in the first half of the book. Both memoir and murder mystery are well-written, but the anecdote and exposition of the memoir are joined uneasily to the narrative of the mystery, and the resulting book is a hybrid of uncertain and therefore not quite satisfying form. The individual parts, though, are thoroughly satisfactory. Smith does not look back these fifty years through a haze of nostalgia. Instead, he tells it like it is—or was. His memoir is plain and largely unreflective, but by no means is it uncolorful. Whether Smith is describing the sudden death of one of his mean-spirited bosses, or the gutting of a deer shot out of season, the scenes and characters are sharply rendered and the dialogue colorful, sometimes crudely so. The result is a memoir that convincingly tells us what it was like to live in a Depression-era logging camp. Likewise, in the murder mystery section, we feel Smith’s terror at being chased and shot at by an unknown and unseen enemy. The mystery is also well-paced and comes to a satisfying resolution. Had the two halves of this book been more satisfyingly joined, the whole might have more than equaled the sum of its well-crafted parts. PAUL LEHMBERG Northern Michigan University ...