Mink River (review)

Brian Doyle, editor of Portland Magazine, award-winning essayist, and author of ten works of nonfiction, has broken new ground with his first novel, Mink River. It is also the first original novel published by Oregon State University Press. The story, told from the perspective of an omniscient, humorous, and strikingly compassionate narrator, floats and spins through the daily occurrences of Neawanaka, a fictionalized community set on the Oregon Coast.

There is really no way to describe Mink River. I have never come across another novel quite like it. The prose is quirky and magical, but the situations described are realistic, sincere, and emotionally moving. As an accomplished essayist, Doyle can certainly turn a phrase or two. When he describes the ecology and convoluted history of this salty coastal community, his prose pulses and pulls with run-on sentences reminiscent of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass or the opening of Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. At other times, particularly when it comes to exchanges of dialogue, the lines turn clipped and terse, echoing the rhythms of someone like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver. This stylistic contradiction might seem like an inconsistency on the part of the author; however, Doyle's narrative flexibility and use of humor eventually lead readers into a place-based mosaic of interrelated tales that will occasionally shock with moments of arresting beauty.

Doyle's balancing act between the mythic and the real gets played out through the lives of people, animals, and waterways that move to the ecological rhythms of a rain-soaked Oregon Coast. There is Worried Man, a character bent on finding the origin of Time in a cave on Wyeast (Mt. Hood), along with his closest friend, Cedar, a man grafted into Neawanaka after his naked and waterlogged body was mysteriously pulled from a river like a tree. These two men comprise the Department of Public Works, an organization committed not only to fixing potholes, but to gathering the town's Irish and indigenous oral histories and smoothing out the rough spots in people's complicated lives. They are surrounded by an ensemble of more than a dozen other memorable characters, including Daniel, a boy who is rescued by a bear after surviving a nearly fatal bicycle accident; No Horses, a Salish artist who carves men out of slabs of oak; Maple Head, an elementary school teacher who encourages her students to "write about some things you believe in that don't make sense"; a town doctor who ritualistically smokes one cigarette per day for every apostle; a terminally ill man who confronts mortality; and a nun who rescues an injured crow named Moses and teaches him how to talk (297).

Doyle has an uncanny ability to make the far-fetched seem perfectly real. Yet, this novel is not all about philosophizing crows, metaphysical quests, and waterlogged storytellers. It also touches on the real-life plight of working-class characters like George Christie, "a former logger," and Declan O Donnell, an ambitious laborer who struggles to make a viable living as a dairy farmer or halibut fisherman (228). Here, in particular, Doyle handles the socioeconomic realities of the Oregon Coast with dignity, ease, and compassion. Readers find Worried Man and Cedar continually working to "heal things" in their broken community (16). Whether it be rescuing a child from domestic abuse, helping someone embrace death, or anonymously distributing food and ale to a union hall where "the old loggers and sailors and fishermen and millworkers congregate too proud to visit the homeless shelter," it is ultimately Doyle's compassionate and interconnected rendering of life in Neawanaka that turns this magical novel into something that is also good for the soul (252).