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Mink River
Like Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood" and Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio, " Brian Doyle's stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.
In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking. . .
It's the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.
319 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2010
724 people are currently reading
12141 people want to read
About the author
Brian Doyle
60 books728 followersDoyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.
Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in:
* the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005;
* in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and
* in Best Essays Northwest (2003);
* and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks.
As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league.
Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002).
Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.
Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in:
* the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005;
* in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and
* in Best Essays Northwest (2003);
* and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks.
As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league.
Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002).
Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,636 reviews
October 12, 2019
4.5 stars
"Sometimes I think that all people in all times must have had the same joys and sorrows... Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and that modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people’s hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn’t changed at all. It’s just the shape of lives that change, not lives themselves."
This beautifully lyrical, captivating novel is unlike anything I can recall having read before. There are a multitude of characters, the people that inhabit the town of Neawanaka on the coast of Oregon. The Mink River runs right through the middle of town. Much like the twists and turns of the river, the stories of the people are ever changing. Each thread is essential to the fabric of this grand tapestry of life.
"… so many stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another and to the stories of creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see, and to stories that used to be here, and still are here in ways that you can sense sometimes if you listen with your belly, and the first green shoots of stories that will be told in years to come…"
Mink River is episodic in nature, but it all comes together with such elegance. The expressiveness of the novel points to the fact that indeed Brian Doyle was not just a writer of novels and essays; he was also a gifted poet. Many of the sentences are structured as in the quote above. At first the run-on quality of the writing gave me pause. As did the element of magical realism. It didn’t take me long to completely forget about these literary stylistic devices, however. Rather, I fell completely under the spell.
The inhabitants of Neawanaka are everyday people with struggles and joys. Everyone has a story to share with one another. And the stories are what lift them up. I loved so many of these characters. Some of them are descendants of The People, an unnamed tribe of Native Americans that settled on the coast thousands of years ago. Some of them trace their ancestry to those who suffered from The Hunger in Ireland. Some are a mix of both. One is not even a person at all, although this little peculiarity often slipped my mind. Moses is a crow. A crow who can think, talk and laugh. He’s even a hero. Some of the most moving scenes in the entire book have Moses front and center.
"Moses, who had been taught to speak by a shy nun who found him broken in the mud, is intricately courteous and circumspect; also he has a dry humor and a corvidian cast of mind, as he likes to say, that combine to make his remarks intriguing."
Such a kaleidoscopic cast of characters grace the pages of this book – two best friends who run The Department of Public Works and do far more than fix roads and sewer lines (they even give haircuts); a doctor who names his cigarettes after the Apostles; a man who sells boxes and can count down the number of days he has left in this world; a cop who is obsessed with Puccini’s Tosca; a twelve-year old boy who wears his hair in braids like his legendary Irish hero; the owner of the town pub who wonders how she got to this point in her life; an artist who is going through a crisis; a brother and sister who have been abandoned by one parent and mistreated by another; and many more too numerous to name but each as significant as the next. Not one life is minimized. We come to understand what makes each of them tick, and it’s all so impactful when one thinks about what this means in this great big world of ours. Nature itself is a character. Not just the animals, but the ocean, the river, the forest. All of it. Everything matters.
"The way hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. They way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife’s voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers…"
I could go on and share more of these exquisite lines, but it’s best to experience the rest on your own. This is a remarkable book that blends magical realism, folklore, and pure, simple, ordinary lives together to illustrate the beauty in each individual creature, person, or piece of creation. I have just discovered Brian Doyle, only to learn that he passed away a couple of years ago. While we won’t be enriched with any new work, I am pleased to see that there is a wonderful backlist that I can look forward to. Highly recommended if you are a fan of strikingly lyrical writing and a good dose of magical realism - even if you aren’t, you just might want to give this a try. I’m sure glad I did.
"There’s a story in everything and the more stories I hear the less sad I am."
"Sometimes I think that all people in all times must have had the same joys and sorrows... Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and that modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people’s hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn’t changed at all. It’s just the shape of lives that change, not lives themselves."
This beautifully lyrical, captivating novel is unlike anything I can recall having read before. There are a multitude of characters, the people that inhabit the town of Neawanaka on the coast of Oregon. The Mink River runs right through the middle of town. Much like the twists and turns of the river, the stories of the people are ever changing. Each thread is essential to the fabric of this grand tapestry of life.
"… so many stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another and to the stories of creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see, and to stories that used to be here, and still are here in ways that you can sense sometimes if you listen with your belly, and the first green shoots of stories that will be told in years to come…"
Mink River is episodic in nature, but it all comes together with such elegance. The expressiveness of the novel points to the fact that indeed Brian Doyle was not just a writer of novels and essays; he was also a gifted poet. Many of the sentences are structured as in the quote above. At first the run-on quality of the writing gave me pause. As did the element of magical realism. It didn’t take me long to completely forget about these literary stylistic devices, however. Rather, I fell completely under the spell.
The inhabitants of Neawanaka are everyday people with struggles and joys. Everyone has a story to share with one another. And the stories are what lift them up. I loved so many of these characters. Some of them are descendants of The People, an unnamed tribe of Native Americans that settled on the coast thousands of years ago. Some of them trace their ancestry to those who suffered from The Hunger in Ireland. Some are a mix of both. One is not even a person at all, although this little peculiarity often slipped my mind. Moses is a crow. A crow who can think, talk and laugh. He’s even a hero. Some of the most moving scenes in the entire book have Moses front and center.
"Moses, who had been taught to speak by a shy nun who found him broken in the mud, is intricately courteous and circumspect; also he has a dry humor and a corvidian cast of mind, as he likes to say, that combine to make his remarks intriguing."
Such a kaleidoscopic cast of characters grace the pages of this book – two best friends who run The Department of Public Works and do far more than fix roads and sewer lines (they even give haircuts); a doctor who names his cigarettes after the Apostles; a man who sells boxes and can count down the number of days he has left in this world; a cop who is obsessed with Puccini’s Tosca; a twelve-year old boy who wears his hair in braids like his legendary Irish hero; the owner of the town pub who wonders how she got to this point in her life; an artist who is going through a crisis; a brother and sister who have been abandoned by one parent and mistreated by another; and many more too numerous to name but each as significant as the next. Not one life is minimized. We come to understand what makes each of them tick, and it’s all so impactful when one thinks about what this means in this great big world of ours. Nature itself is a character. Not just the animals, but the ocean, the river, the forest. All of it. Everything matters.
"The way hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. They way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife’s voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers…"
I could go on and share more of these exquisite lines, but it’s best to experience the rest on your own. This is a remarkable book that blends magical realism, folklore, and pure, simple, ordinary lives together to illustrate the beauty in each individual creature, person, or piece of creation. I have just discovered Brian Doyle, only to learn that he passed away a couple of years ago. While we won’t be enriched with any new work, I am pleased to see that there is a wonderful backlist that I can look forward to. Highly recommended if you are a fan of strikingly lyrical writing and a good dose of magical realism - even if you aren’t, you just might want to give this a try. I’m sure glad I did.
"There’s a story in everything and the more stories I hear the less sad I am."
March 8, 2023
2 "failure as a reader "star !!
My Failure as a Reader Award of 2022
DNF at 19 %
My deepest apologies to the author and Candi.
As beautiful and evocative as the book is...I cannot connect and I don't want to persevere and get frustrated.
I will leave this book to others that can connect and appreciate this book of poetic prose.
My Failure as a Reader Award of 2022
DNF at 19 %
My deepest apologies to the author and Candi.
As beautiful and evocative as the book is...I cannot connect and I don't want to persevere and get frustrated.
I will leave this book to others that can connect and appreciate this book of poetic prose.
July 17, 2022
Mink River is a legend of the town… It is a myth of its fabulous inhabitants… Brian Doyle is a true lover of parlance… The novel is fizzing froth of words…
The town surely is unlike any old European town – it is more like a smallish anthill…
She sculpts her dummies and in the similar manner Brian Doyle sculpts his characters… And similar to her mannequins his characters are just shapes without souls… They are full of activity… But there’s no life… They talk, drink, fuck and die merrily…
To be born, to grow up, to procreate and to die – ants live the same way.
Not an especially stunning town, stunningtownwise – there are no ancient stone houses perched at impossible angles over eye-popping vistas with little old ladies in black shawls selling goat cheese in the piazza while you hear Puccini faintly in the background sung by a stunning raven-haired teenage girl who doesn’t yet know the power and poetry of her voice not to mention her everything else.
The town surely is unlike any old European town – it is more like a smallish anthill…
At work in clay or wood or stone she stares, she breathes evenly, she is riveted, she is lost. No phone. Music gently. Bach when she is in stone, rock and roll in clay, jazz in wood.
She sculpts her dummies and in the similar manner Brian Doyle sculpts his characters… And similar to her mannequins his characters are just shapes without souls… They are full of activity… But there’s no life… They talk, drink, fuck and die merrily…
…they sing themselves and their names in their languages, and Hugh finds that he too is singing chanting saying praying his song, his name in the old language, the language he was born into, Aoidh! Aoidh! he sings, smiling and turning slowly end over end as he rises through the lowering light with everything else that has recently died, all of them singing to the sea.
To be born, to grow up, to procreate and to die – ants live the same way.
June 5, 2012
The language, the writing style, the people, the philosophy? All great. I can't help but cry. I'm crying for the people in the book who died, who were lost, who were injured. I'm crying because not everyone dies when they could have. I'm crying because some people heal. Because some children heal. And because some people get to have love, give love, remain in love, which is so beautiful to walk among, my footsteps causing no distraction. I'm crying, too, because for some there is no love. I now believe a crow can talk his wise thoughts in perfectly lucid English sentences, that bear language can be written down and explained, that the people who populate the area of Mink River are real and that if I just happened to wander north to Neawanaka, I could stop in at Grace's pub and go visit No Horses's sculpture studio and if I were lucky, could sit at the dining table with Worried Man and Maple Head and Daniel and Owen and then go sit with Cedar outside the Department of Public Works as the sun goes down. I'll miss Cedar. I already miss them all. Brian Doyle has written a fine book.
February 11, 2017
I haven't enjoyed a book this much in sooooooo long! Set in a tiny coastal Oregon town, this story is populated with characters who seem to leap off the page and speak their lines directly into your ear: they are that real. Brian Doyle breaks all the "good writing" rules, yet this book is rich and layered and beautiful and profound. Riotous and complex, Doyle's lush tale compels you to read faster than you'd like, because you can't stand not knowing just what the heck is going to happen here. Every sentence is a tiny jewel you want to roll around on your tongue and slowly savor. Quirky, unique and delightful, the tale of Neawanaka gets under your skin and lives inside you. Go read it!
January 31, 2022
Just an incredible book that is hard to describe because it contains the world. Taking place in a small town in Oregon, telling stories of past and present, giving us characters that we love and care about, even , (or especially,) Moses, the crow, it's all written in the most amazing, soaring language that is transcendent.
This was Doyle's first novel. The Plover was his second, which I read 5 years ago, but I was happy to realize that The Plover and Declan O'Donnell got their start in this book.
Absolutely recommended.
This was Doyle's first novel. The Plover was his second, which I read 5 years ago, but I was happy to realize that The Plover and Declan O'Donnell got their start in this book.
Absolutely recommended.
January 13, 2020
I thought this was going to be a bit chaotic, but it wasn't. It was certainly the best read of 2020 so far.
Moses the Crow, with his mouthy wisdoms and his courage, got me going page after page after page, and he wasn't the main character at all. Mmmm...wait... perhaps he was, after all.
He mourned the death of the elderly nun who rescued him and taught him to communicate. He adored psalms. Sometimes he maneuvered a few new moves while flying, just to feel like an eagle or something else that might fancy him. Sometimes, in flight, he would snap at mosquitoes just to experience what is was like to be a swift. Most of the time he was quite successful...
Moses just knew how to bond a community together. He had a bird's eye insight into what was happening in town, that humans were not as aware of. And remember, he could talk...
The ambiance of the book, with a touch of magic realism, and the lyrical prose, had me excited again to read a book and really enjoy it. This was not only word-magic, it was also unique, and so refreshing!
Cedar, the mystery man who once came floating into town, unconscious and blessed with memory loss, got the Department Of Public Works going with his dear friend, actually the man who rescued him from drowning. He suspected a kind of god complex since he had it in his head that they should fix people, instead of doing maintenance on the highways, stream beds and storm drains. His best friend, William Mohan, also known as Worried Man, married to Maple Head, the teacher, could not walk down the street, or enjoy dinner at his own home when someone's pain came calling in his head. Thus it happened that these two gentlemen became known as the town's rescuers.
Perhaps they couldn't, but they sure changed the future for this old fishing- and logging village who were cash strapped and prone to that dark room called depression. In hard times, the less agreeable side tends to rule. That's a diplomatic statement. Cruelty might be a better choice of word. It was no different in this small village. Children suffer the most.
Twelve-year-old Daniel Cooney, Worried Man's grandson, had to figure his nutty family out. He had ample time when he had a cycling accident and had to stay in bed for a few weeks. His dad was Irish; his Irish granddad died building a road that went nowhere; his Irish grandmother lived on a hill in Ireland which she refused to leave; his granddad from here thinks about time all the time and feels other people's pain in his head; his grandmother from here is the strictest teacher in the history of the world; his mom Nora, real name No Horses, can hear wood talk and identify colors by their smells. Owen Cooney taped stories for his son Daniel and worked with that talking Crow. Moses loves to sit on the old Oregon State University helmet in Owen's workshop which is crammed with automobile parts and assorted related ephemera. Owen and Moses were friends since the nun brought him in for repairs, years ago.
There was the mama bear who loved to read the New York Times at the Department of Public Works, and the multitude of other characters introducing humanity to the reader in all our splendor. Warts and all.
The Oregon coast became a multilayered trail of stories and backstories. Whether it was voyages or journeys, the reader is taken back to the hills of Ireland, as well as the wonder mountains of snow somewhere in Oregon, where Time might be waiting for Cedar and Worried Man to explain the meaning of life as we know and love it. That was a Bucket List wish that only two best friends could understand.
The towns folks came together when Daniel had his accident. Even the mama bear had her story to fit in.
Different events in town brought courage and determination out in everyone. There was Timmy and Rachel, Sara and Michael, George Christie and his daughter Cyra, Red Hugh O'Donell, father of Declan, Grace, Paeder and Niall, and Nicholas and his dad. The doctor knew the most about everyone, even the man in the brown coat, and the man who lied in court. They were all peripheral characters whose lives became new stories to tell. The stories were all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another ...
It is truly a warm, often humorous and heartfelt read, written with so much compassion and talent for storytelling. This is one of those novels that I would love to read again. That seldom, if ever, happens.
RECOMMENDED!
Moses the Crow, with his mouthy wisdoms and his courage, got me going page after page after page, and he wasn't the main character at all. Mmmm...wait... perhaps he was, after all.
He mourned the death of the elderly nun who rescued him and taught him to communicate. He adored psalms. Sometimes he maneuvered a few new moves while flying, just to feel like an eagle or something else that might fancy him. Sometimes, in flight, he would snap at mosquitoes just to experience what is was like to be a swift. Most of the time he was quite successful...
Moses just knew how to bond a community together. He had a bird's eye insight into what was happening in town, that humans were not as aware of. And remember, he could talk...
The ambiance of the book, with a touch of magic realism, and the lyrical prose, had me excited again to read a book and really enjoy it. This was not only word-magic, it was also unique, and so refreshing!
Cedar, the mystery man who once came floating into town, unconscious and blessed with memory loss, got the Department Of Public Works going with his dear friend, actually the man who rescued him from drowning. He suspected a kind of god complex since he had it in his head that they should fix people, instead of doing maintenance on the highways, stream beds and storm drains. His best friend, William Mohan, also known as Worried Man, married to Maple Head, the teacher, could not walk down the street, or enjoy dinner at his own home when someone's pain came calling in his head. Thus it happened that these two gentlemen became known as the town's rescuers.
Worried Man: But we are also prey to what I might call a vast and overwhelming ambition. I mean, really, to preserve history, collect stories, repair marriages, prevent crime, augment economic status, promote chess, manage insect populations, run sports leagues, isn’t that a bit much? We even give haircuts.It's not that they can compare themselves with Joan of Arc, or less known by her real name Jeanne La Pucelle of Domrémy. She changed history.
Perhaps they couldn't, but they sure changed the future for this old fishing- and logging village who were cash strapped and prone to that dark room called depression. In hard times, the less agreeable side tends to rule. That's a diplomatic statement. Cruelty might be a better choice of word. It was no different in this small village. Children suffer the most.
Twelve-year-old Daniel Cooney, Worried Man's grandson, had to figure his nutty family out. He had ample time when he had a cycling accident and had to stay in bed for a few weeks. His dad was Irish; his Irish granddad died building a road that went nowhere; his Irish grandmother lived on a hill in Ireland which she refused to leave; his granddad from here thinks about time all the time and feels other people's pain in his head; his grandmother from here is the strictest teacher in the history of the world; his mom Nora, real name No Horses, can hear wood talk and identify colors by their smells. Owen Cooney taped stories for his son Daniel and worked with that talking Crow. Moses loves to sit on the old Oregon State University helmet in Owen's workshop which is crammed with automobile parts and assorted related ephemera. Owen and Moses were friends since the nun brought him in for repairs, years ago.
There was the mama bear who loved to read the New York Times at the Department of Public Works, and the multitude of other characters introducing humanity to the reader in all our splendor. Warts and all.
The Oregon coast became a multilayered trail of stories and backstories. Whether it was voyages or journeys, the reader is taken back to the hills of Ireland, as well as the wonder mountains of snow somewhere in Oregon, where Time might be waiting for Cedar and Worried Man to explain the meaning of life as we know and love it. That was a Bucket List wish that only two best friends could understand.
The towns folks came together when Daniel had his accident. Even the mama bear had her story to fit in.
Different events in town brought courage and determination out in everyone. There was Timmy and Rachel, Sara and Michael, George Christie and his daughter Cyra, Red Hugh O'Donell, father of Declan, Grace, Paeder and Niall, and Nicholas and his dad. The doctor knew the most about everyone, even the man in the brown coat, and the man who lied in court. They were all peripheral characters whose lives became new stories to tell. The stories were all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another ...
It is truly a warm, often humorous and heartfelt read, written with so much compassion and talent for storytelling. This is one of those novels that I would love to read again. That seldom, if ever, happens.
RECOMMENDED!
February 19, 2022
Audiobook…read by David Drummond
….12 hours and 31 minutes
Neawanaka is a small coastal Oregon town. The allure and charm of the surroundings was pure artistry….
…..creeks, rivers, sand, soil, rocks, birds, trees, rain, fog,….other gorgeously written experiences of nature features.
The descriptive lyric prose of nature’s beauty was pristine…poetic…..sometimes almost rhythmic sounding like notes and chords.
Even the narration- the varied stories - the characters- was euphonious and beautifully scored for strings….
“Mink River”….had stylistic instrumental soul.
As for the stories themselves … there’s an abundance of them…. As well as numerous characters.
….Daniel, a twelve year old is rescued by a bear in the woods from a bike accident.
….His grandfather, named Worried Man, was highly attuned to others pain. Perhaps it was ‘synaesthesia’…or maybe just cosmic powers. Native American omnipotence….as in ‘all power’.
….Worried Man didn’t shy away from dangerous missions.
….He and his friend Cedar undertake a calling…a dangerous expedition….
….a police officer who loves opera, a doctor who smokes thirteen cigarettes a day, and names them for the apostles, a teenage couple in love,
….Moses ….was the philosophizing talking crow.
This is not a fast paced story but it was really gorgeous. Even Paul my husband was hooked ….
There’s mystery, bullies, economic struggles, oral cultural history, danger, tragedies and triumphs….
The Irish and Native Americans…make for a wonderful diversified community.
An ‘awe-inspiring’ one-of-a-kind novel ….quirky, sleepy, entertaining….
Thumbs up for small coastal towns….and the preciousness of down-home folks - animals - minerals and the value of community.
….12 hours and 31 minutes
Neawanaka is a small coastal Oregon town. The allure and charm of the surroundings was pure artistry….
…..creeks, rivers, sand, soil, rocks, birds, trees, rain, fog,….other gorgeously written experiences of nature features.
The descriptive lyric prose of nature’s beauty was pristine…poetic…..sometimes almost rhythmic sounding like notes and chords.
Even the narration- the varied stories - the characters- was euphonious and beautifully scored for strings….
“Mink River”….had stylistic instrumental soul.
As for the stories themselves … there’s an abundance of them…. As well as numerous characters.
….Daniel, a twelve year old is rescued by a bear in the woods from a bike accident.
….His grandfather, named Worried Man, was highly attuned to others pain. Perhaps it was ‘synaesthesia’…or maybe just cosmic powers. Native American omnipotence….as in ‘all power’.
….Worried Man didn’t shy away from dangerous missions.
….He and his friend Cedar undertake a calling…a dangerous expedition….
….a police officer who loves opera, a doctor who smokes thirteen cigarettes a day, and names them for the apostles, a teenage couple in love,
….Moses ….was the philosophizing talking crow.
This is not a fast paced story but it was really gorgeous. Even Paul my husband was hooked ….
There’s mystery, bullies, economic struggles, oral cultural history, danger, tragedies and triumphs….
The Irish and Native Americans…make for a wonderful diversified community.
An ‘awe-inspiring’ one-of-a-kind novel ….quirky, sleepy, entertaining….
Thumbs up for small coastal towns….and the preciousness of down-home folks - animals - minerals and the value of community.
October 1, 2013
Neawanaka is a fictitious town on the Oregon coast, and this book is filled with short chapters/vignettes telling brief interludes about the various residents and their day to day lives.
If this hadn't been my book club's monthly pick, I probably never have picked up the book and I definitely would not have finished it. I had a very difficult time getting into this, and half the time I felt myself skimming because nothing was happening. The story is definitely more about the town than about any characters themselves or an actual plot, and I could see that being interesting had the town actually come to life properly. But it never did.
The very first page of the book began well enough, and I liked some of the writing, as the author described what Neawanaka didn't have: No houses crying out to be the cover of a magazine that no one actually reads anyway... No buildings on the National Resister of Hysterical Places, though there are some old houses.... It was a good set up for the book, giving a solid foundation for what the town itself felt like. But as the book went on, the writing seemed to deteriorate - probably because there was nothing to actually say but pages to fill.
The writing in this book seemed like it was trying to be literary. Some sentences went on and on and on, with so many metaphors or descriptions noted so my eyes glazed over. A prime example is this overly wordy sentence, which I dare anyone to read and not have your eyes glaze over:
That is one sentence. Where was the editor?!? Other times, sentences were written with repetition - a nice technique, if you know when the stop. Generally repeats are only effective if you list a few things. This author, however, had no problem filling up an entire page with stuff like this:
And on and on, each sentence noting someone else he'd anointed. SEVENTEEN SENTENCES worth!
I should also note that there was no "dialogue" in this book, per se. People have conversations, but there weren't any quotation marks and instead just listed short sentences, one paragraph at a time, that was supposed to be an exchange, like:
How'd you meet Grampa?
We met by the river.
Did you love him right away?
No.
No?
I was fascinated, though.
Was he fascinated too?
Yep.
How could you tell?
I could tell.
How?
I could tell. You'll see someday.
I'm not sure if that lack of quotation marks was to make this seem more "literary", but none of the dialogue actually seemed authentic and instead simply served as page-fillers. At times, I felt as if the paragraphs in here would be better written as the sort of emo poetry cranked out without rhymes and with half-formed thoughts everywhere. I'll break down a short-ish sentence into one of these poems to demonstrate:
All day long
she
fended off
this
moment
with the tools
in
her
hands
but now
she cups her face
in
her
hands
and sobs
and sobs
and
sobs
Actually, turning it into poetry seems to improve it slightly.
Aside from the book's promising first page, there was little I liked. Some of the characters in the book were decent, while others seemed flimsy. There were a few parts of the book where something actually seemed like it was going to (finally!) happen and I was drawn in: when a resident visited a doctor, or when a policeman tried to secretly communicate his distress to a dispatcher. However, these stories were ultimately glossed over and their resolution never actually shown to the reader - after all, this is a book about the town overall, not about individuals - making these individual tales ultimately forgettable and seemingly pointless.
I don't know whether there was a deeper point or meaning buried somewhere in the book. If there was, I obviously missed it. I found it difficult to focus on this book because of how disjointed it was and how much the writing meandered. Definitely not a book I'd recommend, but clearly it has its fans, since there are good reviews of this on Goodreads!
If this hadn't been my book club's monthly pick, I probably never have picked up the book and I definitely would not have finished it. I had a very difficult time getting into this, and half the time I felt myself skimming because nothing was happening. The story is definitely more about the town than about any characters themselves or an actual plot, and I could see that being interesting had the town actually come to life properly. But it never did.
The very first page of the book began well enough, and I liked some of the writing, as the author described what Neawanaka didn't have: No houses crying out to be the cover of a magazine that no one actually reads anyway... No buildings on the National Resister of Hysterical Places, though there are some old houses.... It was a good set up for the book, giving a solid foundation for what the town itself felt like. But as the book went on, the writing seemed to deteriorate - probably because there was nothing to actually say but pages to fill.
The writing in this book seemed like it was trying to be literary. Some sentences went on and on and on, with so many metaphors or descriptions noted so my eyes glazed over. A prime example is this overly wordy sentence, which I dare anyone to read and not have your eyes glaze over:
At four in the morning, on All Souls Day, the Day of the Dead, the second of November, the priest winning the betting pool, seven drops of water fell from the sky, headlong, pell-mell, sliding from the brooding mist, and then seventy, and then the gentle deluge, a whisper of wet, a thorough and persistence pittering on leaf mold and newt knuckle, web and wood, tent and cent, house and mouse, the rain splittering the sea, soaking boats, rinsing streets, fluffing owls and wetting towels, sliding along power lines and dripping from eaves, rivuleting and braiding and weaving tiny lines in the thirsty earth, darkening the trunks of trees, jewelling the strands of spiders, sliding along clotheslines, moistening the infinitesimal dust in rain gauges.
That is one sentence. Where was the editor?!? Other times, sentences were written with repetition - a nice technique, if you know when the stop. Generally repeats are only effective if you list a few things. This author, however, had no problem filling up an entire page with stuff like this:
[The priest] had anointed men and women and children and infants. He had anointed a boy one day old. He had anointed a boy one hour old. He had anointed three infants he was sure were dead but he couldn't bear to refuse to anoint them before the broke parents. He had anointed a newborn girl with no arms or legs. He had anointed....
And on and on, each sentence noting someone else he'd anointed. SEVENTEEN SENTENCES worth!
I should also note that there was no "dialogue" in this book, per se. People have conversations, but there weren't any quotation marks and instead just listed short sentences, one paragraph at a time, that was supposed to be an exchange, like:
How'd you meet Grampa?
We met by the river.
Did you love him right away?
No.
No?
I was fascinated, though.
Was he fascinated too?
Yep.
How could you tell?
I could tell.
How?
I could tell. You'll see someday.
I'm not sure if that lack of quotation marks was to make this seem more "literary", but none of the dialogue actually seemed authentic and instead simply served as page-fillers. At times, I felt as if the paragraphs in here would be better written as the sort of emo poetry cranked out without rhymes and with half-formed thoughts everywhere. I'll break down a short-ish sentence into one of these poems to demonstrate:
All day long
she
fended off
this
moment
with the tools
in
her
hands
but now
she cups her face
in
her
hands
and sobs
and sobs
and
sobs
Actually, turning it into poetry seems to improve it slightly.
Aside from the book's promising first page, there was little I liked. Some of the characters in the book were decent, while others seemed flimsy. There were a few parts of the book where something actually seemed like it was going to (finally!) happen and I was drawn in: when a resident visited a doctor, or when a policeman tried to secretly communicate his distress to a dispatcher. However, these stories were ultimately glossed over and their resolution never actually shown to the reader - after all, this is a book about the town overall, not about individuals - making these individual tales ultimately forgettable and seemingly pointless.
I don't know whether there was a deeper point or meaning buried somewhere in the book. If there was, I obviously missed it. I found it difficult to focus on this book because of how disjointed it was and how much the writing meandered. Definitely not a book I'd recommend, but clearly it has its fans, since there are good reviews of this on Goodreads!
July 14, 2022
Review and excerpt from this poetic and episodic novel are now posted here:
https://www.kencraftauthor.com/?s=min...
https://www.kencraftauthor.com/?s=min...
October 20, 2022
“That’s why we have wings, you know. To go find stories.”
So says a character named Moses in the superb novel, Mink River. Brian Doyle describes him thusly (p43):
“Moses, who had been taught to speak by a shy nun who found him broken in the mud, is intricately courteous and circumspect; also he has a dry humor and a corvidian cast of mind, as he likes to say, that combine to make his remarks intriguing.”
Note the phrase: “as he likes to say.” And that the curious word, “corvidian,” has as its root, corvidae: the family of birds including crows.
Yes, Moses is a crow. A talking one. A fucking smart, gabby, philosophizing bird.
And he gets more lines than some of the human characters in this novel. AND he is plastered all over the cover of the book.
Okay, sure, there’s a bit of the fantastic, of what some might call magic realism* in this novel. But not “too much.” And rather than tacked on, it arises naturally from the animistic traditions of the People, whose world building myths are heavily populated with animals. The human characters in this novel set on the Oregon coast are largely populated by members of Northwest coast American Indian tribes and by descendants of settlers from Ireland. Both groups are notable for their prolific, fanciful story-telling traditions. Happily, this Native + Irish ambience is all over this book, and the prose itself sings in—forgive me—a lovely tenor, ala, say, that dude in the Chieftains. (I cringe just a little writing that, but it’s kinda-sorta accurate).
As David James Duncan put it so well, “In its sights, settings, insinuations, flora and fauna, (Doyle’s) tale is quintessentially North Coast, but in its sensibility and lilt this story is as Irish as tin whistles—and the pairing is an unprecedented delight…Doyle’s sleights of hand, word, and reality burr up off the page the way bit of heather burr out of a handmade sweater yet the same sweater is stained indigenous orange by a thousand Netarts Bay salmonberries.”
Yes, and I’d add that Doyle’s dazzling, unique style borrows as much from poetry as it does Irish prose. At times he incorporates rhyme, alliteration, repetition of words and syllables. The paragraphs are sometimes long, with clauses often connected with series of “and” (ala Cormac McCarthy and others). And Doyle omits dialogue marks, but let me assure you he knows exactly how to properly do this. Not once did I long for them. Please note that below are numerous examples of Doyle's verbal wizardry. (See also "my quotes", as always, for selections from quotes already posted by others for this book).
Here and there, he gives us two disparate scenes (nearly) at once, told in alternating sentences. I don’t remember ever seeing something like that before. It works beautifully. Hmm… he does this exactly twice. On p.114, and --114 pages later-- on p. 228. Coincidence? As playful as Doyle is, I’d guess it was quite by design.
What else? Dramatically-wise, this is an episodic novel. The conflicts are largely every-day ones, with intermittent tragedies. No one has money. No Horses (aka Nora) suffers from depression. Crime is low, though there are occasional domestic disturbances, child endangerment. A man is kidnapped. And there is a fellow with no name other than “The man with 17 days to live” (then 8… 6 days … hours). A boy’s legs are broken in an accident. A man is killed by a log flying off a truck. Frustrated that his herd of milk cows is worthless, a man shoots them, allowing for a huge bbq for the entire town. Worried Man (aka Billy) and Cedar seek to uncover the secrets of time in an ice cave in the mountains when they aren't counting insects and measuring rainfall for the (multi-purpose, obviously) Dept. of Public Works …. Never were these little stories anything other than, for me, fascinating. And the characters are wonderful. There are many of them (you might want to make a list because even the lesser characters appear multiple times). They are fully drawn. A few are quirky as you might expect, but it isn’t overdone in the slightest.
I absolutely loved this gorgeous novel. The characters, the superb prose, the dramas in this picturesque setting. I’d put in a tie with City of Bohane as my favorite book of the year so far.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Both books are near-guaranteed for my Favorites shelf, but I'll refrain from adding until I've read them at least twice.
--Mary Miller Doyle's charmingly rough map of Neawanaka
A personal note. As it happens, I read this book but didn’t time to review it before leaving on a 6 day trip to, very coincidentally … Portland and the central Oregon coast. Reading it and revisiting Oregon made us pine (pun!) for the Northwest, where I lived for my first 31 years, four of them adjacent to an Indian reservation in Bellingham where my wife worked.
*I’ll get this out of the way before I go on to excerpts. Some describe this novel, in part, as magic realism. The sadly late Brian Doyle rejected this characterization. In reference to the sentient non-human animal characters in his story, he said there is too much we don’t know about animals to call anything out of the usual “magical.��� I’d also add that animism and anthropomorphic animals are prevalent in the American Indian story telling tradition. When you consider, say, some of the strange, "impossible" findings of quantum physics?-- talking crows isn’t all that weird of a thing in the overall scheme of things.
Brian Doyle 1956-2017
………………………………
EXCERPTS
On pp 201-22 is an amazing scene, too long for me to type, that describes the eleven-minute life of a tiny fetus, post-miscarriage:
… and between her legs her son the size of a finger is born into the river and he spins away end over end a tiny silver bird flying toward the sea…. past a blue heron who snaps at him thinking him a fish, and past Anna Christie rocking and singing with Sara also singing .... and past a merganser duck with eight ducklings soon to be seven courtesy of the female mink watching them ... and enters the ancient patient ocean, where all stories end, where all stories are born.
pg 35
Worried Man notes the hour—golden russet slanting light, the hour when the angle of the sun heading toward the ocean illuminates everything seemingly from inside, so that plants glow greenly with their bright green souls naked to the naked joyous eye.
p54
Her fingers combed through her hair as the river quietly roared by and her hair looked like the river when salmon were whirling their way through it like living threads through living cloth…and all he wanted at that moment was to run his fingers through the cascading living water of her hair, the flashes of every other color in it depending on the light, her eyes like that too, flashing in green and brown, her hair and eyes rebellious and alive.
pp190-1
And there is a moment there, as Sara stands by the fence humming, when everyone is town is singing… Worried Man is humming a war song his grandfather taught him from the time the People went to war with those crazy Cheamhills … Anna is standing knee-deep in the river and singing with the baritone groaning of the river rumbling rocks, and George Christie is singing a lewd logging song into the telephone … Even the young female bear is singing, or humming, or making a music deep inside her, a long contented basso throbbing thrumming that fills the tiny cave where she has curled around her two new cubs; and they are singing too, two high sweet notes never heard before in all the long bubbling troubling endless bruised pure violent innocent bloody perfect singing of the burly broken mewling world.
p237-8
The dusk deepens infinitesimally minute by minute, as if someone was adding grains of darkness to the bowl of brimming light on the field, and at exactly the right sifting moment for swifts to appear they appear far overhead, chittering and flittering, taking over the sky from the barn swallow, who swirl and whirl into their muddy tenements and fold themselves up tightly and cleanly as gleaming blinking blue and black and orange knives.
p281
For three days there has been nothing but ice and sky. No trees or bushes or flowers or even a sturdy nutty little mat of plants hiding from the wind. Not even lichen or moss. Ungreen, disgreen, greennot. There is white and there is blue. The primary colors. Blue made white and white melted to allow all the others. That’s how it must have happened.
p294
Declan dozing on the bow in the broad calm light thinks sleepily of sails and the lovely windy words of the craft of enslaving air. Yardarms and lugsails, gaffs and rigs, jigs and boom, luff and clew and tack. Boats buffeted by breezes.
Finally, from Ken Craft's review, the second half of the remarkable last section of the book:
New trout, having never seen rain on the river, rise eagerly to ripples on the Mink. Some windows close against the moist and some open for the music. Rain slips and slides along hawsers and chains and ropes and cables and gladdens the cells of mosses and weighs down the wings of moths. It maketh the willow shiver its fingers and thrums on doors of dens in the fens. It falls on hats and cats and trucks and ducks and cars and bars and clover and plover. It grayeth the sand on the beach and fills thousands of flowers to the brim. It thrills worms and depresses damselflies. Slides down every window rilling and murmuring. Wakes the ancient mud and mutter of the swamp, which has been cracked and hard for months. Falls gently on leeks and creeks and bills and rills and the last shriveled blackberries like tiny dried purple brains on the bristles of bushes. On the young bear trundling through a copse of oaks in the woods snorffling up acorns. On ferns and fawns, cubs and kits, sheds and redds. On salmon as long as your arm thrashing and roiling in the river. On roof and hoof, doe and hoe, fox and fence, duck and muck. On a slight man in a yellow slicker crouched by the river with his recording equipment all covered against the rain with plastic wrap from the grocery store and after he figures out how to get the plastic from making crinkling sounds when he turns the machine on he settles himself in a little bed of ferns and says to the crow huddled patiently in rain, okay, now, here we go, Oral History Project, what the rain says to the river as the wet season opens, project number …something or other … where’s the fecking start button? …I can’t see anything … can you see a green light? yes? is it on? damn my eyes … okay! there it is! it’s working! rain and the river! here we go!
So says a character named Moses in the superb novel, Mink River. Brian Doyle describes him thusly (p43):
“Moses, who had been taught to speak by a shy nun who found him broken in the mud, is intricately courteous and circumspect; also he has a dry humor and a corvidian cast of mind, as he likes to say, that combine to make his remarks intriguing.”
Note the phrase: “as he likes to say.” And that the curious word, “corvidian,” has as its root, corvidae: the family of birds including crows.
Yes, Moses is a crow. A talking one. A fucking smart, gabby, philosophizing bird.
And he gets more lines than some of the human characters in this novel. AND he is plastered all over the cover of the book.
Okay, sure, there’s a bit of the fantastic, of what some might call magic realism* in this novel. But not “too much.” And rather than tacked on, it arises naturally from the animistic traditions of the People, whose world building myths are heavily populated with animals. The human characters in this novel set on the Oregon coast are largely populated by members of Northwest coast American Indian tribes and by descendants of settlers from Ireland. Both groups are notable for their prolific, fanciful story-telling traditions. Happily, this Native + Irish ambience is all over this book, and the prose itself sings in—forgive me—a lovely tenor, ala, say, that dude in the Chieftains. (I cringe just a little writing that, but it’s kinda-sorta accurate).
As David James Duncan put it so well, “In its sights, settings, insinuations, flora and fauna, (Doyle’s) tale is quintessentially North Coast, but in its sensibility and lilt this story is as Irish as tin whistles—and the pairing is an unprecedented delight…Doyle’s sleights of hand, word, and reality burr up off the page the way bit of heather burr out of a handmade sweater yet the same sweater is stained indigenous orange by a thousand Netarts Bay salmonberries.”
Yes, and I’d add that Doyle’s dazzling, unique style borrows as much from poetry as it does Irish prose. At times he incorporates rhyme, alliteration, repetition of words and syllables. The paragraphs are sometimes long, with clauses often connected with series of “and” (ala Cormac McCarthy and others). And Doyle omits dialogue marks, but let me assure you he knows exactly how to properly do this. Not once did I long for them. Please note that below are numerous examples of Doyle's verbal wizardry. (See also "my quotes", as always, for selections from quotes already posted by others for this book).
Here and there, he gives us two disparate scenes (nearly) at once, told in alternating sentences. I don’t remember ever seeing something like that before. It works beautifully. Hmm… he does this exactly twice. On p.114, and --114 pages later-- on p. 228. Coincidence? As playful as Doyle is, I’d guess it was quite by design.
What else? Dramatically-wise, this is an episodic novel. The conflicts are largely every-day ones, with intermittent tragedies. No one has money. No Horses (aka Nora) suffers from depression. Crime is low, though there are occasional domestic disturbances, child endangerment. A man is kidnapped. And there is a fellow with no name other than “The man with 17 days to live” (then 8… 6 days … hours). A boy’s legs are broken in an accident. A man is killed by a log flying off a truck. Frustrated that his herd of milk cows is worthless, a man shoots them, allowing for a huge bbq for the entire town. Worried Man (aka Billy) and Cedar seek to uncover the secrets of time in an ice cave in the mountains when they aren't counting insects and measuring rainfall for the (multi-purpose, obviously) Dept. of Public Works …. Never were these little stories anything other than, for me, fascinating. And the characters are wonderful. There are many of them (you might want to make a list because even the lesser characters appear multiple times). They are fully drawn. A few are quirky as you might expect, but it isn’t overdone in the slightest.
I absolutely loved this gorgeous novel. The characters, the superb prose, the dramas in this picturesque setting. I’d put in a tie with City of Bohane as my favorite book of the year so far.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Both books are near-guaranteed for my Favorites shelf, but I'll refrain from adding until I've read them at least twice.
--Mary Miller Doyle's charmingly rough map of Neawanaka
A personal note. As it happens, I read this book but didn’t time to review it before leaving on a 6 day trip to, very coincidentally … Portland and the central Oregon coast. Reading it and revisiting Oregon made us pine (pun!) for the Northwest, where I lived for my first 31 years, four of them adjacent to an Indian reservation in Bellingham where my wife worked.
*I’ll get this out of the way before I go on to excerpts. Some describe this novel, in part, as magic realism. The sadly late Brian Doyle rejected this characterization. In reference to the sentient non-human animal characters in his story, he said there is too much we don’t know about animals to call anything out of the usual “magical.��� I’d also add that animism and anthropomorphic animals are prevalent in the American Indian story telling tradition. When you consider, say, some of the strange, "impossible" findings of quantum physics?-- talking crows isn’t all that weird of a thing in the overall scheme of things.
Brian Doyle 1956-2017
………………………………
EXCERPTS
On pp 201-22 is an amazing scene, too long for me to type, that describes the eleven-minute life of a tiny fetus, post-miscarriage:
… and between her legs her son the size of a finger is born into the river and he spins away end over end a tiny silver bird flying toward the sea…. past a blue heron who snaps at him thinking him a fish, and past Anna Christie rocking and singing with Sara also singing .... and past a merganser duck with eight ducklings soon to be seven courtesy of the female mink watching them ... and enters the ancient patient ocean, where all stories end, where all stories are born.
pg 35
Worried Man notes the hour—golden russet slanting light, the hour when the angle of the sun heading toward the ocean illuminates everything seemingly from inside, so that plants glow greenly with their bright green souls naked to the naked joyous eye.
p54
Her fingers combed through her hair as the river quietly roared by and her hair looked like the river when salmon were whirling their way through it like living threads through living cloth…and all he wanted at that moment was to run his fingers through the cascading living water of her hair, the flashes of every other color in it depending on the light, her eyes like that too, flashing in green and brown, her hair and eyes rebellious and alive.
pp190-1
And there is a moment there, as Sara stands by the fence humming, when everyone is town is singing… Worried Man is humming a war song his grandfather taught him from the time the People went to war with those crazy Cheamhills … Anna is standing knee-deep in the river and singing with the baritone groaning of the river rumbling rocks, and George Christie is singing a lewd logging song into the telephone … Even the young female bear is singing, or humming, or making a music deep inside her, a long contented basso throbbing thrumming that fills the tiny cave where she has curled around her two new cubs; and they are singing too, two high sweet notes never heard before in all the long bubbling troubling endless bruised pure violent innocent bloody perfect singing of the burly broken mewling world.
p237-8
The dusk deepens infinitesimally minute by minute, as if someone was adding grains of darkness to the bowl of brimming light on the field, and at exactly the right sifting moment for swifts to appear they appear far overhead, chittering and flittering, taking over the sky from the barn swallow, who swirl and whirl into their muddy tenements and fold themselves up tightly and cleanly as gleaming blinking blue and black and orange knives.
p281
For three days there has been nothing but ice and sky. No trees or bushes or flowers or even a sturdy nutty little mat of plants hiding from the wind. Not even lichen or moss. Ungreen, disgreen, greennot. There is white and there is blue. The primary colors. Blue made white and white melted to allow all the others. That’s how it must have happened.
p294
Declan dozing on the bow in the broad calm light thinks sleepily of sails and the lovely windy words of the craft of enslaving air. Yardarms and lugsails, gaffs and rigs, jigs and boom, luff and clew and tack. Boats buffeted by breezes.
Finally, from Ken Craft's review, the second half of the remarkable last section of the book:
New trout, having never seen rain on the river, rise eagerly to ripples on the Mink. Some windows close against the moist and some open for the music. Rain slips and slides along hawsers and chains and ropes and cables and gladdens the cells of mosses and weighs down the wings of moths. It maketh the willow shiver its fingers and thrums on doors of dens in the fens. It falls on hats and cats and trucks and ducks and cars and bars and clover and plover. It grayeth the sand on the beach and fills thousands of flowers to the brim. It thrills worms and depresses damselflies. Slides down every window rilling and murmuring. Wakes the ancient mud and mutter of the swamp, which has been cracked and hard for months. Falls gently on leeks and creeks and bills and rills and the last shriveled blackberries like tiny dried purple brains on the bristles of bushes. On the young bear trundling through a copse of oaks in the woods snorffling up acorns. On ferns and fawns, cubs and kits, sheds and redds. On salmon as long as your arm thrashing and roiling in the river. On roof and hoof, doe and hoe, fox and fence, duck and muck. On a slight man in a yellow slicker crouched by the river with his recording equipment all covered against the rain with plastic wrap from the grocery store and after he figures out how to get the plastic from making crinkling sounds when he turns the machine on he settles himself in a little bed of ferns and says to the crow huddled patiently in rain, okay, now, here we go, Oral History Project, what the rain says to the river as the wet season opens, project number …something or other … where’s the fecking start button? …I can’t see anything … can you see a green light? yes? is it on? damn my eyes … okay! there it is! it’s working! rain and the river! here we go!
October 26, 2018
I meant to write a review of the sprawling novel of America’s Oregon Coast, Mink River by Brian Doyle over Thanksgiving, because it was what I was grateful for. As the year ends, I realize I’m thinking about it still. Grateful for it, still.
Doyle’s narrative style is off-putting (at first), but eventually one that wins you over by sheer earnestness. The narrative is episodic and, what you would call in the dramatic arts, an ensemble piece. If there is a protagonist it is the town of 500 residents itself called Neawanaka on the northwest coast. The cast of characters as one would expect in an outing like this is many: the village doctor who smokes the same number of cigarettes each day, each smoke the name of one of the 12 apostles (plus Matthias who replaced Judas); A working intuitive named “Worried Man,” one of two who runs the tiny (and comprehensive) Department of Public Works; his married daughter who therapeutically carves massive wood chunks and is named “No Horses”; the owner/bartender of the local watering hole who pines for a change in career, a change of a scenery; a crow named “Moses,” who talks and has, literally, a bird’s eye view of the town; a man who beats his son who is called “the man who beats his son”; another in hospital called “the man with thirteen days to live [or twelve…or two, or one…].”
You get the picture. It’s all rather disorienting at first, not unlike a long Russian novel is disorienting with its many characters with multiple names. But in the end, you love these folks, animated by their Irish, and mixed Irish-other (including Native American) heritage, who in a lesser work might be overtly referred to as the “salt of the earth.” You love the town, and the smell of the alder and pine burns off the pages when it’s not, in the form of a log, falling off a truck and going through a windshield and killing a man named Red Hugh O Donnell whose adult children, one a fisherman who is ambivalent about the sea, and his sister who has a drinking problem, aren’t exactly sure how to process the death of their brutal father except, for the time being, to go back to the sea and drink more, respectively.
This is not to say there is no plot. There are several extended questions that inter-weave here: Will the boy Daniel who fell off a cliff on his bicycle walk again? Will his mother be able to recover from “the unshakable sense of herself so shaken”; Will the opera-obsessed cop be able to capture the child-abusing fugitive arrested through Worried Man’s premonitions but who then escaped? Will Moses still be a crow if he can’t fly? How will there ever be enough money to survive in a town whose lumber industry has collapsed?
So there are these overlapping circles of human drama throughout, and that is stabilizing. Compelling as story. But then there’s Doyle’s experimentation which violates all kinds of novel-writing rules—at least the rules you might read about in a How-To-Write book. His prose is purplish, excessive, and uses stacked up adjectives and nouns, and quotes from William Blake as if its creator is in a nursery, gleefully manipulating building blocks for the naked thrill of seeing how tall he can make them. Punctuation at times goes to hell. Sentences run on and on . . . and on. Narrative threads run the risk of getting lost right up until the end. This stuff careens all over the place and is, I would imagine if it surfaced in a graduate writing seminar, be deemed at minimum as “undisciplined,” or “overwrought.”
But it’s also quite wonderful, perhaps the poster child of how inspired, visceral writing trumps craft . . . or more accurately, perhaps, becomes its own craft through its own internal logic. Known for his spiritual nonfiction, sometimes overtly Catholic, Doyle has written a work with a beating heart that resonates with the perpetual sea that alternately nuzzles and violates the shore of this struggling, heart-broken town. And in the end, Mink River re-ups the author’s signature. This book will make you swoon with the relentlessness of life—as relentless as the mercurial sea—and the terror of the dark, damp woods. There are moments of awe and exquisite recognition that require that the reader put down the book, and quiet his or her heart. One of these episodes describe a fetus miscarrying from a swimmer in the upper reaches of the Mink and how it flows seaward and, like the personified protoplasm (or, if you’re Catholic, I suppose, like the person that it is) it sees and feels and glories, however briefly, in the wide, wide world before it plunges into the collective unconscious of the wet universe.
Doyle’s brand may be spiritualized naturalism, admittedly rawer than that of the English romantics’, his rhetorical style one that adds fifteen adjectives or twenty-five nouns in a single, micro description. But structurally, Mink River turns on the author’s periodic “checking in” of his unruly cast. As with the embryo flowing downriver, we get a sort of catalog of what’s going on, the bird’s eye view of what everyone’s doing or thinking at one particular moment. To wit:
"Rain in and on and over and through the town, gentle and persistent, gray and gentle, green and insistent, thorough and quiet, respectful and watchful. On Worried Man and Cedar in the Department of Public Works where they hunch over a table strewn and scattered with maps. On Declan staggering along the beach to the hulk of his boat. On Michael the cop as he drives gently through town humming Puccini and thinking of what to make for dinner for his wife Sara and their girls. On Sara as she spades their garden with the two little girls who are digging as fast and furiously as possible looking for worms because their daddy says if they find fifty worms he will take them fishing tomorrow morning rain or shine. On No Horses walking in the hills, up the old quarry road and through the forest and back along the old quarry road once twice three times. On the young female bear two miles upriver from the village where she found a dead elk calf . . . " (p. 141)
These surveys regularly appear but are themed not just through behavior, but through thoughts, through fears and through prayers and dreams.
In this way, and in others more subtle, Doyle not only brings you along as every good novelist should, but plumbs the depths of his little site by broadening his canvas again and again. More accurately, he draws a broader and broader diameter of circles out and out, then back in and in until the gumbo—the ennui of the quotidian life, mythologies religious and otherwise, addictions, despair, tragedy, economic survival, sensuality, coitus and how one dies--convincingly converges into a satisfying whole.
Sort of like life. Sort of not. Like a river town in the northwest where the forest and the sea seem to be having one long, even eternal conversation—sometimes an argument--while the town’s denizens still, somehow, are living rather than just performing a life--thinking about or actually cupping one another’s faces with their hands to comfort and connect in any one moment. And that is, finally, what makes the town of Neawanaka and Mink River so remarkable: it countermands the narcissism of our age, and of our contemporary literature—so that life lived is just that: a life that is lived. Lives reflected in Doyle’s luminous prose through story in its most numinous sense. Story in the form of a novel that merits my thanks.
Doyle’s narrative style is off-putting (at first), but eventually one that wins you over by sheer earnestness. The narrative is episodic and, what you would call in the dramatic arts, an ensemble piece. If there is a protagonist it is the town of 500 residents itself called Neawanaka on the northwest coast. The cast of characters as one would expect in an outing like this is many: the village doctor who smokes the same number of cigarettes each day, each smoke the name of one of the 12 apostles (plus Matthias who replaced Judas); A working intuitive named “Worried Man,” one of two who runs the tiny (and comprehensive) Department of Public Works; his married daughter who therapeutically carves massive wood chunks and is named “No Horses”; the owner/bartender of the local watering hole who pines for a change in career, a change of a scenery; a crow named “Moses,” who talks and has, literally, a bird’s eye view of the town; a man who beats his son who is called “the man who beats his son”; another in hospital called “the man with thirteen days to live [or twelve…or two, or one…].”
You get the picture. It’s all rather disorienting at first, not unlike a long Russian novel is disorienting with its many characters with multiple names. But in the end, you love these folks, animated by their Irish, and mixed Irish-other (including Native American) heritage, who in a lesser work might be overtly referred to as the “salt of the earth.” You love the town, and the smell of the alder and pine burns off the pages when it’s not, in the form of a log, falling off a truck and going through a windshield and killing a man named Red Hugh O Donnell whose adult children, one a fisherman who is ambivalent about the sea, and his sister who has a drinking problem, aren’t exactly sure how to process the death of their brutal father except, for the time being, to go back to the sea and drink more, respectively.
This is not to say there is no plot. There are several extended questions that inter-weave here: Will the boy Daniel who fell off a cliff on his bicycle walk again? Will his mother be able to recover from “the unshakable sense of herself so shaken”; Will the opera-obsessed cop be able to capture the child-abusing fugitive arrested through Worried Man’s premonitions but who then escaped? Will Moses still be a crow if he can’t fly? How will there ever be enough money to survive in a town whose lumber industry has collapsed?
So there are these overlapping circles of human drama throughout, and that is stabilizing. Compelling as story. But then there’s Doyle’s experimentation which violates all kinds of novel-writing rules—at least the rules you might read about in a How-To-Write book. His prose is purplish, excessive, and uses stacked up adjectives and nouns, and quotes from William Blake as if its creator is in a nursery, gleefully manipulating building blocks for the naked thrill of seeing how tall he can make them. Punctuation at times goes to hell. Sentences run on and on . . . and on. Narrative threads run the risk of getting lost right up until the end. This stuff careens all over the place and is, I would imagine if it surfaced in a graduate writing seminar, be deemed at minimum as “undisciplined,” or “overwrought.”
But it’s also quite wonderful, perhaps the poster child of how inspired, visceral writing trumps craft . . . or more accurately, perhaps, becomes its own craft through its own internal logic. Known for his spiritual nonfiction, sometimes overtly Catholic, Doyle has written a work with a beating heart that resonates with the perpetual sea that alternately nuzzles and violates the shore of this struggling, heart-broken town. And in the end, Mink River re-ups the author’s signature. This book will make you swoon with the relentlessness of life—as relentless as the mercurial sea—and the terror of the dark, damp woods. There are moments of awe and exquisite recognition that require that the reader put down the book, and quiet his or her heart. One of these episodes describe a fetus miscarrying from a swimmer in the upper reaches of the Mink and how it flows seaward and, like the personified protoplasm (or, if you’re Catholic, I suppose, like the person that it is) it sees and feels and glories, however briefly, in the wide, wide world before it plunges into the collective unconscious of the wet universe.
Doyle’s brand may be spiritualized naturalism, admittedly rawer than that of the English romantics’, his rhetorical style one that adds fifteen adjectives or twenty-five nouns in a single, micro description. But structurally, Mink River turns on the author’s periodic “checking in” of his unruly cast. As with the embryo flowing downriver, we get a sort of catalog of what’s going on, the bird’s eye view of what everyone’s doing or thinking at one particular moment. To wit:
"Rain in and on and over and through the town, gentle and persistent, gray and gentle, green and insistent, thorough and quiet, respectful and watchful. On Worried Man and Cedar in the Department of Public Works where they hunch over a table strewn and scattered with maps. On Declan staggering along the beach to the hulk of his boat. On Michael the cop as he drives gently through town humming Puccini and thinking of what to make for dinner for his wife Sara and their girls. On Sara as she spades their garden with the two little girls who are digging as fast and furiously as possible looking for worms because their daddy says if they find fifty worms he will take them fishing tomorrow morning rain or shine. On No Horses walking in the hills, up the old quarry road and through the forest and back along the old quarry road once twice three times. On the young female bear two miles upriver from the village where she found a dead elk calf . . . " (p. 141)
These surveys regularly appear but are themed not just through behavior, but through thoughts, through fears and through prayers and dreams.
In this way, and in others more subtle, Doyle not only brings you along as every good novelist should, but plumbs the depths of his little site by broadening his canvas again and again. More accurately, he draws a broader and broader diameter of circles out and out, then back in and in until the gumbo—the ennui of the quotidian life, mythologies religious and otherwise, addictions, despair, tragedy, economic survival, sensuality, coitus and how one dies--convincingly converges into a satisfying whole.
Sort of like life. Sort of not. Like a river town in the northwest where the forest and the sea seem to be having one long, even eternal conversation—sometimes an argument--while the town’s denizens still, somehow, are living rather than just performing a life--thinking about or actually cupping one another’s faces with their hands to comfort and connect in any one moment. And that is, finally, what makes the town of Neawanaka and Mink River so remarkable: it countermands the narcissism of our age, and of our contemporary literature—so that life lived is just that: a life that is lived. Lives reflected in Doyle’s luminous prose through story in its most numinous sense. Story in the form of a novel that merits my thanks.
June 18, 2023
"Mink River" is set in Neawanaka, a village on the Pacific coast of Oregon populated with individuals having Native American and Irish heritages. Both the Tillamook and the Irish have strong traditions of storytelling infused with the magical. Using a series of short passages, the book tells about the villagers, folklore, and the setting. A talking crow, Moses, helps the community members work together when any of them experience hard times. The bubbling Mink River, the powerful ocean, and various streams are infused with bright life and music.
"Mink River" is written with warm, lyrical language, but very little plot. However, the reader will feel like they have visited Neawanaka, and care about the characters by the book's end. There are strong themes of storytelling, time, community spirit, family love, courage, and a connection to the natural world. "Mink River" is not a book for someone looking for a fast-moving plot, but readers of literary fiction should enjoy it.
"Mink River" is written with warm, lyrical language, but very little plot. However, the reader will feel like they have visited Neawanaka, and care about the characters by the book's end. There are strong themes of storytelling, time, community spirit, family love, courage, and a connection to the natural world. "Mink River" is not a book for someone looking for a fast-moving plot, but readers of literary fiction should enjoy it.
April 30, 2013
This is a novel unlike any other I've read before I think, even though for awhile I was reminded of Jon McGregor, especially pertaining to some stylistic tics (e.g., lists and no quotation marks for dialogue), an omniscient viewpoint and at times this view being one of a bird's-eye -- literally, at least in this book.
A couple of the characters quote William Blake and another reads the Acts of the Apostles, some of his thoughts intermingling, and in a King-James style, as he does. The language is the thing in this almost prose-poem of a novel. I'm not at all surprised that Doyle writes essays, which are at their best when the language sings, and that he writes poems, seeing here his use of alliteration, synonyms, rhymes and lists, which at one point I thought were going to be too much, but the effect that couldn't be achieved otherwise and the flow of the sentences drew me back and kept me there. As with poetry the work works best when it can be read, as much as possible, uninterruptedly.
So, there's lyricism, there's natural history, there's a sort of magical realism, there are Irish and Salish tales and folklore. (I loved the explanation of the idea of "The People.") There's not much plot nor character development, though the characters are interesting and interested me, and what there are of those novelistic elements serve the overarching story, and themes, of this fictional town in Oregon on the coast of the ocean.
A couple of the characters quote William Blake and another reads the Acts of the Apostles, some of his thoughts intermingling, and in a King-James style, as he does. The language is the thing in this almost prose-poem of a novel. I'm not at all surprised that Doyle writes essays, which are at their best when the language sings, and that he writes poems, seeing here his use of alliteration, synonyms, rhymes and lists, which at one point I thought were going to be too much, but the effect that couldn't be achieved otherwise and the flow of the sentences drew me back and kept me there. As with poetry the work works best when it can be read, as much as possible, uninterruptedly.
So, there's lyricism, there's natural history, there's a sort of magical realism, there are Irish and Salish tales and folklore. (I loved the explanation of the idea of "The People.") There's not much plot nor character development, though the characters are interesting and interested me, and what there are of those novelistic elements serve the overarching story, and themes, of this fictional town in Oregon on the coast of the ocean.
June 5, 2020
How very sublime. Mink River has flowed in and out of my life several times over the years. I've had other copies in my possession; twice they have gone away with friends and never returned. I've known for years how beloved this book is to so many readers and I think I feared that I wouldn't be as captivated, or that I'd even dislike it with the intensity reserved for highly-lauded books that you just don't get, so I kept putting it off.
A few weeks ago a friend pressed another copy into my hands."You must read this," he assured me. And so at long last I did. And loved it more than I could have imagined.
Mink River shimmers in the moonlight glow of lore and possibility, in a place that seems to be on the very edge of the world, of reality, even, sometimes, of hope. Doyle presents a hardscrabble logging and fishing village slumping off Oregon's Coastal Range into the Pacific Ocean. It is a wet and whispery place, settled thousands of years ago by indigenous tribes who knew Paradise when it filled their bellies and souls. Now, remnants of those tribes still live in the fictional town of Neawanaka, carving stories into wood, into their children, into the forests and creatures which stand watch over its myriad inhabitants.
The novel offers up over a dozen characters, including the wise, and wise-cracking, crow Moses, and we come to know and love them all deeply. The narrative is a loosely strung collection of vignettes, tied together by the town, and the characters' daily lives. The plot is a sense of tension over near-future forks in the road some characters face, a few near-disasters, and the reader's hope that all will be resolved with the same sense of tenderness and possibility that Doyle presents in all the preceding pages.
Brian Doyle died of brain cancer in 2017 at the age of 60. He left a tremendous body of work, volumes of essays and creative non-fiction, short stories, three novels. Mink River found me at last, at just the right moment in time. I look forward to exploring Brian Doyle's legacy of humanity and artistry.
A few weeks ago a friend pressed another copy into my hands."You must read this," he assured me. And so at long last I did. And loved it more than I could have imagined.
Mink River shimmers in the moonlight glow of lore and possibility, in a place that seems to be on the very edge of the world, of reality, even, sometimes, of hope. Doyle presents a hardscrabble logging and fishing village slumping off Oregon's Coastal Range into the Pacific Ocean. It is a wet and whispery place, settled thousands of years ago by indigenous tribes who knew Paradise when it filled their bellies and souls. Now, remnants of those tribes still live in the fictional town of Neawanaka, carving stories into wood, into their children, into the forests and creatures which stand watch over its myriad inhabitants.
The novel offers up over a dozen characters, including the wise, and wise-cracking, crow Moses, and we come to know and love them all deeply. The narrative is a loosely strung collection of vignettes, tied together by the town, and the characters' daily lives. The plot is a sense of tension over near-future forks in the road some characters face, a few near-disasters, and the reader's hope that all will be resolved with the same sense of tenderness and possibility that Doyle presents in all the preceding pages.
Brian Doyle died of brain cancer in 2017 at the age of 60. He left a tremendous body of work, volumes of essays and creative non-fiction, short stories, three novels. Mink River found me at last, at just the right moment in time. I look forward to exploring Brian Doyle's legacy of humanity and artistry.
January 7, 2013
well, now wasn't that delicious?
April 28, 2024
Rating: 10
The words 'magnificent, triumph, extraordinary and ground breaking' come to mind when describing this engaging, offbeat story of a fictional small town in Oregon. And there's a reason we see an image of a crow named Moses on its cover. To wit, "..Human people, says Moses think that stories have beginnings, middles and ends, but we crow people know that stories just wander on and on and change form and are reborn again and again. That is who they are. Stories are not words, you know. Words are just clothes that people drape over stories. When crows tell stories, stories tell us, do you know what I mean?..."
The Mink River flows through the town of Neawanaka; to the west lies the Pacific, a salt marsh to the north, national forest to the south and in the distant east, a range of 'very high' mountains. It's not big or terribly small and home to Irish, American and Native Indians.
Beyond the lumber mill and other businesses sits the Department of Public Works run by Billy, aka Worried Man and Cedar who are not only colleagues but the best of friends. Worried Man's daughter is No Horses; her son Daniel is the apple of Billy's eye.
Some 40 years ago Worried Man and Maple Head were fishing on the river and happened upon a floating body. Once on shore, Maple Head (Billy's wife) revived the man who we now know as Cedar.
Maple Head teaches school, and among the students are the O'Donnell boys whose mother Grace and brother Declan own a fishing boat. Owen is Maple Head's husband and runs Auto & Other Repair, the 'other' being the mainstay of the business. His pet crow Moses was discovered as a chick by the Nun who taught him to speak while raising him. The crow's vocabulary rivals the most educated, his knowledge of the Universe, uncanny. Owen's son Daniel helps out when not in school since he loves the the endless collection of tools, oddities, bike chains and his father as well. One of the great elements is 'storytelling within the story' via regular encounters between Daniel and his grandfather whose stories are woven into the 'fabric'.
In addition to these characters, we have The Man Who Beats his son, Michael's wife Sarah and his daughters and others whose lives eventually merge toward the end. Highlights include halibuts the size of doors, Old Man O'Donnell shooting his cows, Daniel crashing his bicycle and nearly losing his legs, the doctor who cares for him while smoking cigarettes named after Bible characters, 'the man with 12 days to live' and so much more.
The reader must appreciate the beauty of character, plot and story world in order to partake of the journey. This is literary fiction at its best and an author who's been compared to Dylan Thomas which is quite the compliment. His language is rich and lush and equal to the landscape he describes.
Brian's lyrical narrative is symphonic; its five part format like a play. Within each part are numbered sections whose quote-less dialog act as scenes. Doyle uses what might be called a non-linear approach incorporating themes of love, redemption, family and community which act as the glue. I would add that since the majority of my GR friends read mystery exclusively, Doyle tosses in a bit toward the end with a rather unique outcome.
In my humble opinion this book is one of the most unique, compelling and creative I've encountered. Its appeal will be to those who appreciate ground breaking narrative, quirky characters and lyrical phrasing unlike any you've witnessed. When I closed the book the first word that came to mind was "Wow!"
The words 'magnificent, triumph, extraordinary and ground breaking' come to mind when describing this engaging, offbeat story of a fictional small town in Oregon. And there's a reason we see an image of a crow named Moses on its cover. To wit, "..Human people, says Moses think that stories have beginnings, middles and ends, but we crow people know that stories just wander on and on and change form and are reborn again and again. That is who they are. Stories are not words, you know. Words are just clothes that people drape over stories. When crows tell stories, stories tell us, do you know what I mean?..."
The Mink River flows through the town of Neawanaka; to the west lies the Pacific, a salt marsh to the north, national forest to the south and in the distant east, a range of 'very high' mountains. It's not big or terribly small and home to Irish, American and Native Indians.
Beyond the lumber mill and other businesses sits the Department of Public Works run by Billy, aka Worried Man and Cedar who are not only colleagues but the best of friends. Worried Man's daughter is No Horses; her son Daniel is the apple of Billy's eye.
Some 40 years ago Worried Man and Maple Head were fishing on the river and happened upon a floating body. Once on shore, Maple Head (Billy's wife) revived the man who we now know as Cedar.
Maple Head teaches school, and among the students are the O'Donnell boys whose mother Grace and brother Declan own a fishing boat. Owen is Maple Head's husband and runs Auto & Other Repair, the 'other' being the mainstay of the business. His pet crow Moses was discovered as a chick by the Nun who taught him to speak while raising him. The crow's vocabulary rivals the most educated, his knowledge of the Universe, uncanny. Owen's son Daniel helps out when not in school since he loves the the endless collection of tools, oddities, bike chains and his father as well. One of the great elements is 'storytelling within the story' via regular encounters between Daniel and his grandfather whose stories are woven into the 'fabric'.
In addition to these characters, we have The Man Who Beats his son, Michael's wife Sarah and his daughters and others whose lives eventually merge toward the end. Highlights include halibuts the size of doors, Old Man O'Donnell shooting his cows, Daniel crashing his bicycle and nearly losing his legs, the doctor who cares for him while smoking cigarettes named after Bible characters, 'the man with 12 days to live' and so much more.
The reader must appreciate the beauty of character, plot and story world in order to partake of the journey. This is literary fiction at its best and an author who's been compared to Dylan Thomas which is quite the compliment. His language is rich and lush and equal to the landscape he describes.
Brian's lyrical narrative is symphonic; its five part format like a play. Within each part are numbered sections whose quote-less dialog act as scenes. Doyle uses what might be called a non-linear approach incorporating themes of love, redemption, family and community which act as the glue. I would add that since the majority of my GR friends read mystery exclusively, Doyle tosses in a bit toward the end with a rather unique outcome.
In my humble opinion this book is one of the most unique, compelling and creative I've encountered. Its appeal will be to those who appreciate ground breaking narrative, quirky characters and lyrical phrasing unlike any you've witnessed. When I closed the book the first word that came to mind was "Wow!"
May 24, 2019
This is a beautiful book that illustrates what is meant by “grace” and the “sacramentality of the ordinary”. Set in a small coastal town, the stories of several graced characters, of their Native American and Irish ancestors, of the non-human creatures are woven together in a pattern of simple, but stunning beauty. Read aloud, this could easily be mistaken for poetry. At times, I wondered if the characters and place was only an interesting canvas on which the author could paint in language. Depending on the reader, the word play might feel like a showy distraction or might be perceived as exquisite. It was the later for me. Even the use of magical realism, which I usually do not enjoy, worked perfectly in this book. 4.5 stars
July 19, 2025
I loved this book. It's not really a usual story. . . or book. . .or tale.
It's more poetical than that. Like a complicated list of community members, characters, citizens even, with tangents and darting diversions and backstories, that may or may not cross-reference. And every now and again there is a footnote that doesn't track but is so interesting it gets its own endnote and mention in the index wrap up.
And in the complicated list of items of importance that are people, there will also be animals (some chatty, some not), living things like trees, leaves, rivers, and inanimate things.
A reader like you just has to hang on. or let go. you choose. (in other words, some people really love this book, and some people just don't.)
I five stars love it. It seriously reminds me of Spoon River Anthology if everyone had gotten more time on the page before they were dead and the cast was more diverse. And you'd have to throw in some crows, rivers and lightning bolts, etc.
25|52: 18f
It's more poetical than that. Like a complicated list of community members, characters, citizens even, with tangents and darting diversions and backstories, that may or may not cross-reference. And every now and again there is a footnote that doesn't track but is so interesting it gets its own endnote and mention in the index wrap up.
And in the complicated list of items of importance that are people, there will also be animals (some chatty, some not), living things like trees, leaves, rivers, and inanimate things.
A reader like you just has to hang on. or let go. you choose. (in other words, some people really love this book, and some people just don't.)
I five stars love it. It seriously reminds me of Spoon River Anthology if everyone had gotten more time on the page before they were dead and the cast was more diverse. And you'd have to throw in some crows, rivers and lightning bolts, etc.
25|52: 18f
February 13, 2016
"Mink River" is a novel that I alternated between loving and being irritated by at various points while reading it. The language and unique syntax that Brian Doyle employs is wonderfully evocative. It is simply gorgeous at moments. However, it is not enough to sustain 319 pages, and after a while because the plot is so simple (not a bad thing) it starts to grate on the nerves. Mr. Doyle's use of adjectives gets a little carried away at times. In fact, I found it downright tedious, and thought the author was trying to be cute and literary with language. I would not have felt this way had he been more judicious in his use of stylistic extravagances. Long stretches of this book I would give a 3 star rating, and other parts I would give a 5. It really is an inconsistent text, but I am very glad that I read it. "Mink River" is better than most of the stuff out there...but it could have been great. The talent is obviously there.
The novel is a lot like the recent book "Knockemstiff", and the older "Winesburg, Ohio", in that it follows the lives of various members of a community. However, it is happier and more uplifting than either of those texts. When the book follows a traditional narrative, actually tells a story, it is very good. The first 150 pages of the text are a drag, but after that it becomes more narrative in nature and I got invested in it. However, when half of a book borderline bores you, there is a problem. The reason it took me so long to get into is because Doyle has one of his main characters tell these long history of "the people" (Native Americans) stories and the digressions bored me after the first few. There were no real elements of plot in them, and thus it was very easy to read them and not remember immediately afterward what you just read. It happened to me on more than one occasion while reading.
I read "Mink River" for a book club, and my appreciation of the text was greater after our discussion. There is a lot there, and one of the most effective aspects of the text is that I know the characters. They were very visceral and real to me, and that was achieved primarily through Doyle's effective use of repetition, and subtle characterization. He is clearly a talented writer, and this is an extraordinary book. But that does not alleviate my mixed feelings about parts of it.
You could certainly make a worse reading choice, and kudos to a writer who is challenging and unique. I can't complain about that!
The novel is a lot like the recent book "Knockemstiff", and the older "Winesburg, Ohio", in that it follows the lives of various members of a community. However, it is happier and more uplifting than either of those texts. When the book follows a traditional narrative, actually tells a story, it is very good. The first 150 pages of the text are a drag, but after that it becomes more narrative in nature and I got invested in it. However, when half of a book borderline bores you, there is a problem. The reason it took me so long to get into is because Doyle has one of his main characters tell these long history of "the people" (Native Americans) stories and the digressions bored me after the first few. There were no real elements of plot in them, and thus it was very easy to read them and not remember immediately afterward what you just read. It happened to me on more than one occasion while reading.
I read "Mink River" for a book club, and my appreciation of the text was greater after our discussion. There is a lot there, and one of the most effective aspects of the text is that I know the characters. They were very visceral and real to me, and that was achieved primarily through Doyle's effective use of repetition, and subtle characterization. He is clearly a talented writer, and this is an extraordinary book. But that does not alleviate my mixed feelings about parts of it.
You could certainly make a worse reading choice, and kudos to a writer who is challenging and unique. I can't complain about that!
May 25, 2012
I gave my book club a hard time about this choice and, frankly, I was really rude about it - blowing into the group an hour late and I'd only read half the book. I probably broke every book club etiquette rule there is and I apologize. Now that I've finished the book, I was perhaps a bit too tough on it in my spoken comments.
There are many things I actually liked: the talking crow, the residents of the town especially Worried Man and Cedar, how depression is described and "brains against pain." The author gives readers a real sense of what community means. For example, turning the anger-inspired slaughter of cows into an occasion for a picnic for the whole town.
What keeps me from a wholehearted endorsement is the author's uncontrollable need to include lists of nouns that go and on. While it makes the work distinctive, it also cheapens it because it tosses the reader outside the story by saying, 'hey, look at all the nouns I know!' For example, "We ate flounder, herring, smelt, seals, sea lions, whales, salmon, elk, deer, bear, and yetska roots...." and then he goes on for another page. My husband says lists are a guy thing, but every time the author started down that road I wanted to throw my book at him.
There are many things I actually liked: the talking crow, the residents of the town especially Worried Man and Cedar, how depression is described and "brains against pain." The author gives readers a real sense of what community means. For example, turning the anger-inspired slaughter of cows into an occasion for a picnic for the whole town.
What keeps me from a wholehearted endorsement is the author's uncontrollable need to include lists of nouns that go and on. While it makes the work distinctive, it also cheapens it because it tosses the reader outside the story by saying, 'hey, look at all the nouns I know!' For example, "We ate flounder, herring, smelt, seals, sea lions, whales, salmon, elk, deer, bear, and yetska roots...." and then he goes on for another page. My husband says lists are a guy thing, but every time the author started down that road I wanted to throw my book at him.
January 7, 2015
4.5 stars. This is a tremendous read. It is about life in a small town, but not just any small town. A town with a bit of magic. But not in the elves and wizards sense. We know Mother Nature possesses her own unique magic, because it is all around us, and if we're at all tuned in, it can't help but bowl us over every now and then. In this book though, that magical essence is highlighted and becomes an important part of the story. This is what set this book apart, for me.
So the setting becomes its own character, and the characters are interesting people. They all grow and develop in interesting ways, and in ways we can all identify with. There is birth, death, love, hate, abuse, all of the things you'd expect to find in a book such as this, but there will be some elements you aren't expecting, and that is where the magical realism comes in, a bit. For me, it did not go beyond the pale at all. It's pretty much how I imagine life to be.
I can also vouch for the audiobook, which was not spectacular, but I'm sure not disappointed I own the Audible of this one. I know I'll listen to it again. I think this is a book better read than listened to, because the language is so beautiful at times that you'll want to reread lines again and again. If I ever write a book, this is the type of book I'd like to write.
And speaking of the creative arts, I'd like to take a second and share my art blog with you. My aim is to draw, paint, sew, or sculpt something every day, and post it here. I've found in my mid-40s that I need art in my daily life to achieve balance, and this blog is my promise to myself not to let a day go by without it. Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll visit! http://createarteveryday.wordpress.com
So the setting becomes its own character, and the characters are interesting people. They all grow and develop in interesting ways, and in ways we can all identify with. There is birth, death, love, hate, abuse, all of the things you'd expect to find in a book such as this, but there will be some elements you aren't expecting, and that is where the magical realism comes in, a bit. For me, it did not go beyond the pale at all. It's pretty much how I imagine life to be.
I can also vouch for the audiobook, which was not spectacular, but I'm sure not disappointed I own the Audible of this one. I know I'll listen to it again. I think this is a book better read than listened to, because the language is so beautiful at times that you'll want to reread lines again and again. If I ever write a book, this is the type of book I'd like to write.
And speaking of the creative arts, I'd like to take a second and share my art blog with you. My aim is to draw, paint, sew, or sculpt something every day, and post it here. I've found in my mid-40s that I need art in my daily life to achieve balance, and this blog is my promise to myself not to let a day go by without it. Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll visit! http://createarteveryday.wordpress.com
April 10, 2011
As I awaited delivery of Mink River, anticipation grew like a kid’s count-down to Christmas. I had visions of a story rambling (unencumbered by such pesky details as punctuation) into all the perfect places. So, image my disappointment when, all those bike trips to the post office later, the first copy arrived and I sliced the box open before taking off my helmet, cracked the cover and read those first short, chopped sentences. To think Brian Doyle, one of my favorite authors, had caved so quickly to convention and burdened his prose with periods! I dropped my helmet on the counter and put the tea pot on. Before the water was half way to hot I was soaring along, eye ball to eye ball, with an eagle guiding my way into a story larger and more intricately beautiful than I had hoped. It reads like fine lace. It makes me feel like the mysterious ways I imagine the trillions of cells in our three pound brains shiver and twitch in the improbable and astounding dance of consciousness. It’s the butterfly wing causing the tornado; the shimmering life of a few billion copepods propelling a humpback’s graceful bulk from the sea; the cliff my mind drops off when I try and guess precisely how many spruce needles there are in the world.
I am not sure how many times I called neighbor Kim to say get this, you gotta here this sentence, its fecking perfect, or how many times I prodded my wife back from the edge of sleep to share the finger boy’s journey or Moses’ deft description of the clan of crows or the bear’s dark language or Nora’s dark snow or…..
This is one great read.
I am not sure how many times I called neighbor Kim to say get this, you gotta here this sentence, its fecking perfect, or how many times I prodded my wife back from the edge of sleep to share the finger boy’s journey or Moses’ deft description of the clan of crows or the bear’s dark language or Nora’s dark snow or…..
This is one great read.
November 21, 2014
It's about nothing & everything. Storytelling at its finest. Completely gorgeous. I loved it.
(If you read & enjoy this book, I think you'd also enjoy Galore by Michael Crummey.)
(If you read & enjoy this book, I think you'd also enjoy Galore by Michael Crummey.)
Read
February 8, 2022Well, let me see . . .
. . . there was a talking crow (not a metaphor) who does heroic things, a non-talking bear who likewise performs life-saving tasks, other bears who smell roasting meat but don't crash the party; there's an old man who senses pain prophylactically, a doctor who smokes twelve cigarettes each day (they are named: one for each of the Apostles), a revered nun; passion does not wane for the elderly, not in Mink River; there's one father who beats his son and another father who attacks his daughter (but she's not really my daughter) but both will be dealt with in turn; there's a man, resigned to things, who is unnamed except for the number of days he has left; there's a cop who only listens to Puccini's Tosca, of course; a woman sculptor pairs well a man who knows where the wood is, as does one woman bar owner who wants to own an orchard with another woman, bequeathed muddy land, who thinks a pub can do more than sell beer. . . .
. . . this is a vision of Americana where, yes, everybody is underpaid yet surprisingly optimistic; at least there are second chances.
There is a beautiful vignette here where a hard man is killed, but the place has a funeral notwithstanding. Owen is asked to say something in Gaelic - that beautiful language - by the man's daughter; and he does, even though only Owen understands what he's saying. He doesn't translate it while he speaks, only in his own mind. He speaks harsh words about the deceased but notes he has left something beautiful behind. Notwithstanding. Later, the daughter asks him to say in English what he had spoken. He does, but without the harsh words, making English a beautiful language too.
I liked, too, that in a kind of acknowledgements page at the end, called Thanks, the author lists seven books and four pieces of music that he immersed himself in while writing this. "Lodestars, compass points, emotional touchstones during the wrestling of this peculiar tale to paper," he calls them. Having peeked ahead, that's how I knew to play Gorecki's Third from the list. And it worked.
. . . there was a talking crow (not a metaphor) who does heroic things, a non-talking bear who likewise performs life-saving tasks, other bears who smell roasting meat but don't crash the party; there's an old man who senses pain prophylactically, a doctor who smokes twelve cigarettes each day (they are named: one for each of the Apostles), a revered nun; passion does not wane for the elderly, not in Mink River; there's one father who beats his son and another father who attacks his daughter (but she's not really my daughter) but both will be dealt with in turn; there's a man, resigned to things, who is unnamed except for the number of days he has left; there's a cop who only listens to Puccini's Tosca, of course; a woman sculptor pairs well a man who knows where the wood is, as does one woman bar owner who wants to own an orchard with another woman, bequeathed muddy land, who thinks a pub can do more than sell beer. . . .
. . . this is a vision of Americana where, yes, everybody is underpaid yet surprisingly optimistic; at least there are second chances.
There is a beautiful vignette here where a hard man is killed, but the place has a funeral notwithstanding. Owen is asked to say something in Gaelic - that beautiful language - by the man's daughter; and he does, even though only Owen understands what he's saying. He doesn't translate it while he speaks, only in his own mind. He speaks harsh words about the deceased but notes he has left something beautiful behind. Notwithstanding. Later, the daughter asks him to say in English what he had spoken. He does, but without the harsh words, making English a beautiful language too.
I liked, too, that in a kind of acknowledgements page at the end, called Thanks, the author lists seven books and four pieces of music that he immersed himself in while writing this. "Lodestars, compass points, emotional touchstones during the wrestling of this peculiar tale to paper," he calls them. Having peeked ahead, that's how I knew to play Gorecki's Third from the list. And it worked.
March 10, 2011
A crow on the cover? An Oregon story? Hot damn, was I ever excited! Maybe if I could have gotten used to the work moving between an epic poem and traditional novel, sometimes in the midst of a thought, I might have made it to the end, for it certainly had some lovely and inspiring moments. As it was, it just made me nuts.
April 9, 2022
Okay, I have to admit, right up front, I loved everything about this book but it's not something that will appeal to everyone. It's extraordinarily lyrical, written in a very peaceful tranquil way without any dramatic variation, even when the situation called for panic or excitement. It, primarily, follows the lives of a few residents of a small coastal community in Oregon, some with unusual names like Worried Man, Maple Head or Cedar. There is no plot or storyline in the book but it just tells of various events or episodes in the lives of the residents. This alone would have made this a five star read for me but there is another aspect about the book that made it personal for me. I grew up in the 50's and early 60's in a small coastal community in Oregon and there were parts in the book that sounded exactly like where I grew up. The book dredged up long forgotten memories that I hadn't thought about for over sixty years. For example, Doyle talked about Salmonberries and I remember all of the various berries that were available by just going out into the forest surrounding the community such as Salmonberry, Huckleberry, Blackberry and the wild Strawberry that were in the sand dunes at the beach. He, also, talked about the size of the trees and I can remember log trucks hauling logs through town that would take three trucks to haul one tree which had been cut into sections. Those trees were six to eight feet in diameter but they have all been gone now for over forty years, leaving mostly clearcuts in their place. It's a beautifully written book that is perfect for anyone who enjoys lyrical prose.
January 12, 2013
I finished reading this book on kindle and have now bought the paperback edition to reread for my book club. We will discuss it on January 11.
Words fail me: I can't find a way to describe the experience of reading Mink River. As I read I knew I would read it again and again.
January 1, 2013
I started rereading Mink River today.
January 3
Finished first section. This time I'm keeping a list of characters and noticing more carefully the handling of time.
January 10
Finished rereading, with enormous appreciation.
January 11
Today my book club discussed Mink River. We were all deeply moved, probably had one of our most intense discussions. Beautiful, poetic writing; touching relationship between and among the characters. Incidentally, we also noted the lack of electronic stuff, the intense connection of people and nature, the freedom of children to explore their surroundings. My familiarity with Oregon and its coast enhanced my experience.
February 11, 2023
Poetically written novel about a small (fictional) town on the coast of Oregon and the people who live there, many of Irish or Native American descent. The Pacific Northwest is a beautiful country, and the descriptions of the terrain are lovely. The characters are deeply drawn. The story transcends a solely realistic story to include a very few elements that add a mystical quality. It contains all the elements of life – happiness, sadness, relationships formed and broken, births, deaths, humor, cruelty, and kindness. These people are doing the best they can to get by. We learn about their desires, dreams, and often difficult choices. I found it easy to emotionally engage. The author has a talent for bringing an entire community to life, complete with all its tragedies and joys. It is creative and flows well, bringing to mind the titular river. I do not remember how I heard about this book but it falls into the category I call “hidden gems.”
October 11, 2011
"Mink River"... where do I begin? This book is the reason I joined goodreads, after reading a review of it here. It's been a while since a book moved me so deeply that I had to momentarily pause to put it down, breathe deeply, and revel in the absolute swell of feeling that washed over me.
I found this book at Cloud and Leaf in Manzanita, OR, the weekend I got married in the pouring rain and thick salty air.. so perhaps I was primed for this tale of a small coastal OR village and the characters that really create the sense of place. "Mink River" evokes some of my favorite authors and poets... Faulker, Joyce, Mary Oliver, and Gary Snyder, among others, and swirls Coast Salish folklore throughout. It's an incredible, heady mix of voices that blurs the lines of plausible and mythical.
More a character study and melange of linked fictions than a plotted story, I found myself completely immersed in each character, and completely enchanted by the sense of place. Lyrical and full of alliteration and an almost mesmerizing flow of language, "Mink River" is a gift. Thank you, Brian Doyle.
I found this book at Cloud and Leaf in Manzanita, OR, the weekend I got married in the pouring rain and thick salty air.. so perhaps I was primed for this tale of a small coastal OR village and the characters that really create the sense of place. "Mink River" evokes some of my favorite authors and poets... Faulker, Joyce, Mary Oliver, and Gary Snyder, among others, and swirls Coast Salish folklore throughout. It's an incredible, heady mix of voices that blurs the lines of plausible and mythical.
More a character study and melange of linked fictions than a plotted story, I found myself completely immersed in each character, and completely enchanted by the sense of place. Lyrical and full of alliteration and an almost mesmerizing flow of language, "Mink River" is a gift. Thank you, Brian Doyle.
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