DEEP RIVER, what you'd expect from Karl Marlantes...yes, it's that good

DEEP RIVER
KARL MARLANTES
Atlantic Monthly Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$1.99 on Kindlesale! Get it now!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Karl Marlantes's debut novel Matterhorn has been hailed as a modern classic of war literature. In his new novel, Deep River, Marlantes turns to another mode of storytelling—the family epic—to craft a stunningly expansive narrative of human suffering, courage, and reinvention.

In the early 1900s, as the oppression of Russia's imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and the politicized young Aino—are forced to flee to the United States. Not far from the majestic Columbia River, the siblings settle among other Finns in a logging community in southern Washington, where the first harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests begets rapid development, and radical labor movements begin to catch fire.

The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness—climbing and felling trees one-hundred meters high—while Aino, foremost of the book's many strong, independent women, devotes herself to organizing the industry's first unions. As the Koski siblings strive to rebuild lives and families in an America in flux, they also try to hold fast to the traditions of a home they left behind.

Layered with fascinating historical detail, this is a novel that breathes deeply of the sun-dappled forest and bears witness to the stump-ridden fields the loggers, and the first waves of modernity, leave behind. At its heart, Deep River is an ambitious and timely exploration of the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember when I warbled my fool lungs out about how awful, painful, and enraging Matterhorn was, and then gave it my annual 6-stars-of-five nod? And told y'all to move quick and get the book? No?! What do you mean, "no"?! You don't commit all my reviews to memory?! Ingrates....

The wattage of warbling is lower this time, but then again I'm ten years older. Everything is lower. (I hate you, Gravity.) What is not lower is Karl Marlantes' level of writing:

Then, like a seaborne Sisyphus, the ship clawed to the top of the next towering wave, as the sailors fought gravity and slippery decks to maintain their balance and their lives.
–and–
With those you love, you accept that there are only two ways you will not get hurt when you lose them. You stop loving them or you die first.

It's to your taste, or it's not; but it is not describable as bad. I've heard the "purple prose" calumny tossed lightly about in reference to Marlantes's work; I am not on board with this. What might seem purple to some readers is, in my way of looking at it, period-appropriate formality. And the lush sensory world is a feature, not a bug, to me...in historical fiction it adds a layer of depth to the world I spend time and effort creating in my reading eye.

What is, I fear, describable as "bad" is Author Marlantes's gender politics. Women, I am here to tell you, do not think about their breasts unless a man is ogling them, or they've chosen that man's attention to attract. (I listen when women talk instead of staring at their boobs. Try it sometime! Fascinating what women know.) I fear that the author's cishet maleness rears its head here. Fly over it (my solution, since I care nothing about boobs) or pass on by. Similarly I Rose Above a character's christian beliefs. Mostly because she's an actual, not a religious, christian. Icky, but endurable since she's not all gawd and church and suchlike bullshit.

So all that dealt with, let me say that I think the lushness and enfolding sensual reality of the work is worth the things I don't find to my personal taste. I won't say I'll give it all the stars, I've mentioned places that take away from that level of enjoyment, but the story of the Koskis leaving oppressed-by-colonialism Finland to become the colonial despoilers of the Pacific Northwest's glorious rainforests struck me as very interesting and quite moving.

Their fates are, as one can intuit from early on, set in the Old Country. Who you are, at your core, is set early in life. All the Koskis are Finns to the bone. What they do, as immigrants ever have, is try on the identity of "American" over their Finnishness. This is a process that I've always found deeply, profoundly moving. To leave the place that formed you because it has no room for you is painful. But the fact is that when Home doesn't want you, it ain't home anymore.

There is no part of this read that I was not able to enjoy. Realizing I am not a woman, I offer the caution above; and I am old, so many anti-colonial younger persons aren't going to resonate as I did to the theme of discovering the identity "American" and trying it on for size. A few of the queer young folk (especially my trans friends) might find the enforced emigration from Home familiar.

But I encourage all y'all to get it on your Kindles while it's only $1.99.

MATTERHORN by Karl Marlantes, a 6-star must-read novel

MATTERHORN
KARL MARLANTES
Atlantic Monthly Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five, but it deserves six

The Publisher Says: Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

My Review: Waino Mellas, newly minted Marine infantry lieutenant, arrives in the tender embrace of Bravo Company a scared, green, awkward, scared, stupid, scared kid and, after a huge amount of pain, loss, and hellish enraging waste of life and liberty, becomes a man.

No, really.

Marlantes was a Marine in Vietnam. He took thirty years...longer than most of this planet's people have been alive...to bring forth this horrifying, harrowing, agonizing artwork. I expect we will not see another book from him, or if we do, it will be so radically different from this one as to be unrecognizable as created in the same brain.

The pain and the horror are obviously not going to let him go. He's exorcised them as best a man can in writing this book. But I don't feel a sense of relief at the end of this book. I don't finish up when he stops writing. I think that's because the experience of reading this book is so shattering. OBVIOUSLY! OBVIOUSLY!! it's no smallest patch on actually living this book, but it's a rare experience to read something so complete, so clearly delineated in its scope and its purpose, and that has power...ask a demolitions person about the power of an explosion contained in a box...but more than that, it has purpose. I don't know Marlantes. I don't know that I want to. I know enough about him after reading this book to hate the idea of sending kids across oceans to kill other human beings before I think they're even ready to *love* other human beings, because so many of them won't live to become the man he has.

I hate that fact so much that I hurt inside. I want to scream and cry and rage and mourn and weep with the mothers and fathers whose souls are now scarred and deformed by the pain of losing a child. It won't help, they're launched on a horrible personal journey, but GODDAM IT they're people whose lives changed forever because of some stupid slogan like "national interest."

Ahem. The book.

So, what has Marlantes wrought? A long, hard journey of a book that millions will read some of, and back away scared...be one of the few who go the distance, and you will never, ever forget the journey or the guide. Worth it.