Crossing the River: A Novel [Hardcover]

Fenton Johnson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Martha Bragg Picket is an original. Brandishing her confederate lineage and tossing her red hair, she crosses the river near her Kentucky home in the mid-1940s, stepping out of her fundamentalist Baptist world, and setting convention on its ear. Across the river, Martha crashes the sacrosanct male preserve of the Miracle Inn, orders a beer, and seduces owner Bernie Miracle, a Catholic. Their unlikely marriage endures for 20 years, puzzling their Catholic neighbors because it produces only one offspring. Martha's dormant expectancies of life are stirred by a slick, philandering Yankee contractor, with whom she enjoys a liberating though scandalous affair. Though this is essentially the story of a woman's awakening, not so much sexually as in terms of her identity, there are other battles between the sexes here. Johnson, recipient of numerous literary awards, is a storyteller of distinction. He knows the regional, religious and emotional insularity of his Kentucky characters and reveals them with sly humor.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Johnson's first novel contrasts the teetotaling Baptists of Mount Hermon, Kentucky, with their liquor-peddling Catholic neighbors north of the Knobs Fork River. On a dare, Martha Pickett crosses the river to buy beer and soon thereafter marries the tavern owner, Bernie Miracle. Twenty-three years later she feels smothered by the Miracle clan. When a Detroit contractor arrives to build a new bridge, she is drawn into an affair only to discover that her lover is also involved with the young woman from Mount Hermon who is being courted by her own son. Like the country music lyrics sung by one of the main characters, Johnson's story is full of passion and pain. It is usually convincing but suffers from soap-opera excess.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: Birch Lane Pr (September 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155972000X
• ISBN-13: 978-1559720007
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,196,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars ... for a better view, December 30, 2010

By 

Bill Coan (Hortonville, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Crossing the River (Paperback)

The ancient Greeks were driven along one road by the intellect and along another by the passions, Bertrand Russell said. And so it goes, Kurt Vonnegut later added.

In Crossing the River, Kentucky-born novelist Fenton Johnson demonstrates that love (that supreme passion) courses through life as a river courses through the Kentucky landscape, carving mountains (those ephemeral mountains!) into knobs both beautiful and worthy of contemplation.

Along the south side of the Knobs Fork River lies the Baptist town of Mount Hermon. Along the north side lies the Catholic town of New Hope. Martha Bragg leaves Mount Hermon for New Hope to marry Bernie Miracle, 12 years her senior and keeper of a bar called the Miracle Inn.

Although Martha is wild of spirit and has big dreams, one outcome of her passion for Bernie and New Hope is motherhood, and so for nearly twenty years, far longer than her passion for Bernie lasts, Martha devotes herself to housekeeping and the care of her husband and their son. "I had no more choice in what I was doing than a coon on the run," she says later. "And then I was treed, and what could I do but sit tight and make the best of things?"

In making the best of things, Martha makes a life. Describing that life and the making of it allows Fenton Johnson to explore the ways passion, place, longing, imagination, memory, and hope shape events and character.

By the time Martha's son Michael (known to all as "Miracle") graduates from high school, he has a spirit as wild, dreams as big, and passions as strong as those that Martha had at his age. Miracle's experiences are uniquely his, though, and Martha recognizes that he will have to confront life on his own terms. She accepts that this will require him to leave his birthplace, as she left hers. Indeed, even as she comes to embrace her own connection to New Hope and the Miracle Inn, she intuitively understands that Miracle needs to explore a much wider world.

Martha's story and Miracle's story are told with insight and sympathy and a range of understanding uncommon in first novels. The prose exhibits what John Updike called a kind of abstract dynamism, with something of the quality of a poem.