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Crossing the River: A Novel

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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.