River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (review)

characters chronicles two decades of unrequited love. The story is set amid China's cultural revolution, but Jin is less interested in depicting an oppressive state than he is in using the politics and authoritarianism of post-Mao China to mirror his characters ' emotional struggles. Lin Kong is an army doctor who, out of familial obligation, married Shuyu, a simple peasant woman. After the couple has a daughter, the result of their only sexual encounter, Lin goes to Muji City, where he is a doctor in the Chinese army for the next eighteen years. His only link to his country home is through the financial support he dutifully provides . When he visits his family in Wujia town for two weeks each year, he and Shuyu keep separate rooms as though they were siblings. The purpose of these annual furloughs is always the same: to divorce Shuyu. But each year the provincial authorities deny his request, and the still married Lin returns to the base and to the woman he truly loves, Manna Wu, a magnetic and spirited young nurse with an unlucky past. Lin's love of reading, a highly subversive act in China during the 1960s, is perhaps what attracts him to Manna, but even in books Lin is unable to relinquish his tight control over his emotions. He is moved by Manna, but his desire for her is more like a curiosity, a resistible temptation, than true, undying love. Manna is twenty-six and still unmarried, which makes her the subject ofmany rumors around the base. Army protocol forces Manna and Lin to keep their companionship ridiculously discreet. In this perilous love triangle, Manna's longings ultimately remain unmet. Meanwhile Lin struggles with the voice of an alter ego that teUs him he has been affected by the systematic ideology of the institutions he serves on a much deeper level than he is aware. Although he is well intentioned throughout, Lin is unable to step outside the realm of predictability to be an emotional provider because of his belief that "we're each sequestered in our own suffering ." (LS) River-Horse: A Voyage Across America by William Least Heat-Moon Houghton Mifflin, 1999, 528 pp., $26 To call William Least Heat-Moon's most recent book ambitious is a bit like referring to the twenty-seven hundred tortuous miles of the Missouri River as a challenging waterway . After his microcosmic "deep map" of Chase County, Kansas, in PrairyErth, the author has returned to the more familiar form of the travel narrative that proved so successful in his first book, Blue Highways. But that road trip pales by comparison to the voyage he began just outside New York Harbor on Earth Day in 1995 aboard the Nikawa (Osage for "RiverHorse "), a twenty-two-foot vessel resembling "a Maine lobster boat crossed with a turn-of-the-century harbor tug." He spent the next 103 days crossing the continent almost entirely on the shallow waters of its rivers, compromising only when absolutely necessary by making short portages, venturing onto a lake or canal, or making temporary use of smaller craft. The waters he traveled— among them the Hudson, Allegheny, 184 · The Missouri Review Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, Salmon, Snake and Columbia Rivers—make up a litany of American history and westward expansion. In aU, HeatMoon covered more than five thousand miles of water, much of it difficult and some of it extremely dangerous. Such an endeavor has all the makings of a late-twentieth-century epic, loaded as it is with historical resonance , implications regarding national myth and identity and the spiritual overtones of a personal quest. HeatMoon 's immediate objectives of "living fully, becoming aware, [and] deepening memory" are very much in keeping with epic impulses. He is most concerned with "deepening" our memories by weaving events from virtually every period of American history into appropriate points of the narrative. Naturally enough, he is especially attentive to the journals of Lewis and Clark, whose route he retraces to some extent. Far from being intrusive, the historical background brings to life the cities, towns and countryside that the Nikawa passes. As River-Horse re-creates the past along the rivers it...