Customer Reviews

River of Heaven: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sam Brady has hidden from life and merely observed the passing of the world. The world and his past are about to come find him. All because of a silly doghouse.

Sam's only real companions in recent memory have been his succession of dogs. Sam decides to build Stump, his current hound, a doghouse that looks like a ship. Arthur, his widowed neighbor and an ex-Navy man, feels the need to contribute his expertise. Soon the two are almost friends.

Enter Duncan Hines, a newspaper reporter who does a human interest story on Stump's ship. Duncan mentions that he's a relative of Dewey Finn. Dewey Finn who died on the railroad tracks in 1955. Dewey Finn, the only person in the world, besides his brother Cal, that Sam ever really felt close too. Just the mention of that name sets Sam's present on a collision course with his past.

The more actively Sam participates in his present, the closer the past comes. Between the appearance of Arthur's granddaughter and the reemergence of old acquaintances, life won't seem to let Sam slip away unnoticed anymore. When Cal returns for the first time in a very long time, it becomes inevitable that the truth will have to come out about that long-ago day. Truths from then and now will have to be faced, before they destroy everyone.

Sam's often meandering tale comes out in bits and pieces. The past and the present are woven together in a beautiful way-a way that keeps you curious and anticipating, while easing you into a complete understanding of Sam Brady. By the end of the novel, Sam's pain, his loss, his torture, and even his hope are all very real.

This is a simple, sweet, tragic story of how hiding from life doesn't keep you safe, and the evils of the past don't always like to stay there. It broke my heart and made me smile.

Armchair Interviews says: That's high praise for a good storyteller.

I enjoyed Lee Martin's "River of Heaven," but never got past merely "enjoying" it. First, he's an excellent writer--Martin writes with a reserved elegance that I truly admire and I relished many of his phrases. Beyond that, however, I felt he was asking too much of me, stretching my credulity beyond the common sense point. I just couldn't get past the feeling that it was a stage show with too much make-up and hastily painted props.

The attempts at the Philip Marlowe dialogue get a little silly--"He's killed a man, and even if it was in self defense, as I know it was--Cal with that Ruger Single six in the pouch of his hooded sweatshirt, just waiting for the right time to make it do its business..." I was waiting for someone to say, "Yes, angel, I'm gonna send you over."

Enjoyable, but forced.

I loved The Bright Forever and thought I would love River of Heaven also. The story of Sam and Dewey and company was engaging and interesting but.....along came Cal and the story got a bit convolted for my tastes. I loved all the characters and wished I had loved the book also. Maybe the next time.

I wanted to like this book. I loved A Bright Forever. The writing is very good but at times I skipped through- a bit too pensive for me.
The characters are pretty creepy so I didn't really care for them. Maybe I was just in the mood for something more uplifting with a feel good ending. This is not it.

This is a book that at times can seem almost maddeningly slow, and at other times almost impossibly fast. It's about secrets that have been concealed for 50 years that suddenly start coming unravelled. Sam Brady, the central figure, is a rather reclusive closeted gay man in his 60's who has not seen or heard from his older brother Cal in decades. Arthur Pope, his widowed neighbor, befriends him. Dewey Finn, a close friend of Sam as a boy, has been dead for 50 years, killed in odd circumstances. Duncan Hines, a young newspaper reporter does a story about Sam and Arthur: it turns out that Hines is related to Dewey. There seems to be quite a few coincidences, and the number of coincidences grows at a rather alarming pace.

The story plods along, and then CNN does a hostage story involving a Cal Brady: Sam immediately knows that this is his long-unseen brother. This didn't feel quite right. The name Cal Brady isn't that unusual. If the brother's name were Ludwig Hassenpfeffer I'd probably have accepted the recognition. Soon the brother shows up, and the pace of the novel picks up. Cal's arrival brings a lot of complexity to the plot, but not in a good way--it all feels too contrived. We see way too many turgid "thrillers" (I use the term loosely here) about the President's daughter being kidnapped, or the like: kidnapping the daughter of the Mayor of Wartburg I guess isn't interesting enough--things need sexing up. Without revealing spoilers, the whole reason for Cal's returning could have been vastly simplified, and we could have done away with lots of complexity, coincidence, and plot elements that seem very farfetched.

The basic plot line--Sam, Cal, and Dewey--is good: small-town events, small-town life, nothing too dramatic or earthshaking, would have worked just fine. The problems of being gay in a small town in the 1950's and beyond should provide plenty of material for a good story. You can have secrets that won't matter to anyone outside the town, or outside the family. Think perhaps of the movie Jaws--a rather simple, straightforward plotline, nothing lurid or sexy. Then consider Benchley's novel from which the movie was taken. Benchley sexed the story up--adultery, the Mafia, etc. River of Heaven has the same problem--a good basic plot with too much other stuff thrown in to spice things up. Without the coincidences (lots of coincidences) and the convolutions, there's a good story at the heart here.

I read an interview piece on Lee Martin in Poets and Writers magazine and could not wait to discover this new writer. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed the book. The first part was eloquently written. I adored his spare prose and well crafted sentences that fit the characters. His writing reminded me of Ken Haruf. The second part read like a Hollywood synopsis of a family melodrama: shooting, secrets, militia, and so on. Indeed, there were too many coincidences. Everyone somehow knew everyone else. The only character that burned brightly in my mind was Dewey Finn, who was ironically not much of a character in the novel. Sammy's character was rather annoyingly inept, making a lot insensible decisions. Another question that lingered on my mind was that everyone seemed to accept each other's predicament as it was without explanations or sincere redemptions. For example, Maddie just showed up at Arthur Pope's (her grandfather) house; Cal (Sammy's brother) just showed up at Sammy's; and Duncan Hines (Dewey Finn's relative) just showed up as a journalist in Mt. Gilead. Overall, it was a good read. It could've been great.

River of Heaven is a beautifully crafted book that is a good page turner. Lee Martin addresses the issues of aging and the destructive power of shame and secrets. That said, I think the characters were a bit weak. The main character, Sam, left me confused. Is he a hermit or is he a frustrated social wanna be? Can anyone really be as "perfect" as Vera is portrayed? In spite of these problems, I still found the book a good read and the primary themes were addressed well

I did not enjoy this book at all and was sorry I bothered with it.
The characters were not only unbelievable but unlikable, and the story line
even more so. I finished it simply because I was led to believe there
was an exciting "secret" that the entire book led up to...only to be sorely
disappointed.

I have never read a book by this author before and River of Heaven (what
is with the title?) has clearly turned me off to anything else he may
have written.

Another truly outstanding book from Lee Martin. I loved River of Heaven, and I think it's because his characters, once again, are so wonderfully complex but still seem completely real. Also, I noticed that, again, Martin masterfully repeats a single phrase, a refrain if you will, to keep the emotional back story present in the reader's head at all times--in this book, it's two of the main characters who say, "You asleep?" to anyone who does something out of the ordinary, a shorthand comment cultivated from their childhood that constantly reminds the reader of their troubled past.

I am beginning to believe that Lee Martin is one of the best writers of our time. I would recommend this book and his last--The Bright Forever--to everyone

In River of Heaven, author Lee Martin visits a boatload of trouble upon Sam Brady, the focal character:

1. The weight of a childhood secret
2. A lonely life as a closeted homosexual in a small, Midwestern town
3. A scheming brother who is vaguely associated with domestic terrorists and their plan to take down the Sears Tower

In lesser hands these threads would unravel, but Martin gives us a novel that's tightly plotted--every twist both surprising and inevitable given what we know of the characters and their desires and disappointments. Yes Sam's story is sweeping and out of proportion to his seemingly quiet and unassuming life. But Martin, like his narrator Sam, knows that it's usually the small things--a dropped penny here, a newspaper photo there--that lead to trouble writ large.

Martin's sentences are as beautiful as his plot is well-crafted (e.g. "Times like these, I try harder than ever to believe there's a kinder world going on somewhere else beyond this one, and, if there really is, we'll all find it one day."). His mastery of small town (and 1950s) vernacular is worth the price of the book. And, even amid such high drama, his characters are just as flawed and feeble as, in Sam's words, "the crumbled up folks we are when we're alone with ourselves." All told, River of Heaven is the best boys-on-railroad-tracks fiction since Stephen King's novella, The Body.

Buy this book.