Customer Reviews

In the River Sweet: A Novel

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First with HUMMINGBIRD HOUSE and now with IN THE RIVER SWEET, Patricia Henley has established herself as a novelist of social and political wars. Her characters are rarely in the center of violent war but instead occupy the fringes, the gray areas people don't often consider. IN THE RIVER SWEET centers around Ruth Anne, a woman who traveled to Vietnam during the war to be closer to her drafted fiance Johnny and who spent her time there binding books at a convent. When the books opens, Ruth Anne has been married to Johnny for over twenty years. Their daughter Laurel has just announced that she is in love with a woman, a fact that Ruth Anne can accept intellectually but not personally. To complicate her already turbulent emotions, Ruth Anne is contacted via email by the secret son she left behind in Vietnam. Everything she had counted on shifts dangerously underneath her.

Henley touches upon - but does not fully develop - the effects of the Vietnam War, the clandestine operations in Laos, and gay rights. Each member of Ruth Anne's family bears scars from at least one of these conflicts. They all seek a salve to alleviate their pain and confusion. While Henley roots her people in war (and gay-bashing falls into that category), she cares less about the particulars of the general issues and more about the private lives affected by them. Ultimately, this is a novel about love and family.

I recommend this novel for readers of literary fiction and of socially engaged work. The interior nature (no quotation marks, detailed exploration of thoughts and emotions) demands greater concentration than does a commercial novel. Because Henley's last work was a finalist for the National Book Award, expect to see this novel garner widespread attention.

IN THE RIVER SWEET is a provocative, engaging, thoughtful page-turner with fully-drawn characters and crisp, stirring prose. Fans of Henley's last novel, HUMMINGBIRD HOUSE, will find much to like here, as well. Amazon's synopsis (above) does a good job of describing the events; I'll describe how you'll feel when you put the book down -- you'll feel dizzy in all the good ways. The prose shrugs off quotation marks and the like, which makes the reader essentially inhabit the characters' world more fully than ever before. Bravo to a brave new book.

First with HUMMINGBIRD HOUSE and now with IN THE RIVER SWEET, Patricia Henley has established herself as a novelist of social and political wars. Her characters are rarely in the center of violent war but instead occupy the fringes, the gray areas people don't often consider. IN THE RIVER SWEET centers around Ruth Anne, a woman who traveled to Vietnam during the war to be closer to her drafted fiance Johnny and who spent her time there binding books at a convent. When the books opens, Ruth Anne has been married to Johnny for over twenty years. Their daughter Laurel has just announced that she is in love with a woman, a fact that Ruth Anne can accept intellectually but not personally. To complicate her already turbulent emotions, Ruth Anne is contacted via email by the secret son she left behind in Vietnam. Everything she had counted on shifts dangerously underneath her.

Henley touches upon - but does not fully develop - the effects of the Vietnam War, the clandestine operations in Laos, and gay rights. Each member of Ruth Anne's family bears scars from at least one of these conflicts. They all seek a salve to alleviate their pain and confusion. While Henley roots her people in war (and gay-bashing falls into that category), she cares less about the particulars of the general issues and more about the private lives affected by them. Ultimately, this is a novel about love and family.

I recommend this novel for readers of literary fiction and of socially engaged work. The interior nature (no quotation marks, detailed exploration of thoughts and emotions) demands greater concentration than does a commercial novel. Because Henley's last work was a finalist for the National Book Award, expect to see this novel garner widespread attention. -- Debbie Lee Wesselmann

This book was about people I really came to respect and care about deeply. It's also thought-provoking on a number of levels - secrets v. openness, the legacy of Vietnam, the failure/disappointment Ruth feels in her traditional Catholicism, making peace with the past, etc. I would recommend this book strongly . Didn't find it at all confusing, as some others have said. Can't wait to read Hummingbird House now.

I thoroughly enjoyed In The River Sweet. Henley addresses several intense, important issues but the book is not confusing or overwhelming. Her stories are so touching and give a very rich picture of each character, without becoming bogged down in unnecessary details. I couldn't put this book down!

This book is a wonderful, emotionally raw story. There is just a real honesty to it, a pretty hard thing to come by when you're reading a made up story. You really just get into the characters' skins. I wish I could find more books by this person. An excellent author, and a fantastic novel.

Who is Bruce Wasser and where did he learn to read?

Of all things this book might be, "banal" is not one of them. Reviews confusing personal taste with claims informed by evidence aren't really reviews. They're rants. Tantrums. And they often reveal some kind of repression, which is precisely what Henley is writing about. It's as if Ruth Anne's priest, Father Carroll, had reviewed the book.

Henley's a great writer. This book should have gotten more attention in the wake of 9/11, but it was sadly passed over and not properly supported by the publisher. A resurgence of it is in order, along with more widespread and academic attention given to Hummingbird House and Henley's masterwork short story, "The Secret of Cartwheels."

Her work occupies that space between the stunted intellect of the church, which would condemn her writing's sensuality, and the stunted aesthetics of the academy, which can't handle anything with a spiritual center unless it spitefully ridicules religion. The first sign of real ingenuity and inventiveness is this liminal position between cultures of rejection.

Look for Henley's canonization in a few decades, by some scholar who "recovers" neglected authors. Ironically, the current intelligencia in publishing and academia will have to be held culpable.

I first became familiar with Henley through "The Secret of Cartwheels". In the River Sweet is an amazing story of a family who, like most of us, appear "normal" to our friends and neighbors. If you're looking for a quick read - buy something at the airport. You need time to digest this. For those who think that Henley's stream-of-consciousness is difficult to read, skip Faulkner. Frankly, she does it better than he does, but it takes a little bit of thought to be able to absorb it all. In this book, we get to hear the inner thoughts of the characters, and thus, learn some of their deepest secrets, and watch what happens when decades-old secrets come to surface at the same time as other life-changing events.

Buy the book. Make a cup of tea, and read a few chapters at a time whenever you get a quiet moment, and you'll be deeply rewarded.

This is a beautiful novel about human nature, history, relationships, and much, much more. What a talented author!

It would take quite an effort to make the legacy of the Vietnam War, the consequences of withholding secrets from a spouse and the impact of reuniting with a child after some thirty years of separation uninspiring and boring. Not only does National Book Award finality Patricia Henley do that in her terminally stultifying "In the River Sweet," she does so with a style that deliberately bedevils her readers. Overwritten, unnecessarily atmospheric and banal, her novel fails in every task she set for it to achieve.

On the surface, the dilemmas faced by Ruth Anne Bond compel interest and engagement. She breaks away from her tyrannical aunt and journeys to Vietnam in the late 1960s to be with her loving fiance only to discover that he is missing in action. An innocent relationship with a blind Vietnamese man results in a pregnancy and a subsequent giving up of her newborn son. Years later, these events, as they invariably do, come back to haunt her. "In the River Sweet" never makes up its mind as to how to develop the important themes of legacy, love and family.

Instead, Henley prefers labored paragraphs detailing the interminable confusions and ambivalences Ruth Anne experiences. Predictably, she withdraws from her devoted husband, Johnny, who, in turn, is frustrated by his inability to reach the woman to whom he has devoted his life. Mired in religious angst -- naturally enough, Ruth Anne retreats to a Catholic convent where the nuns neatly incorporate Buddhist meditation into their theology -- Ruth Anne spends nearly one hundred pages wondering if she should respond to a computer salutation from her long-abandoned son, who, it goes without saying, now lives in a neighboring city.

If this potboiler treatment of serious issues isn't bad enough, the book is a stylistic disaster. Henley has chosen to eschew all punctuation in her dialogue, making the reader work to merely decode her inept use of dialogue. Why do authors refuse to adhere to the conventions of written English? Does Henley think that "River" becomes more of a work of art by eliminating quotation marks? By forcing readers to spend their energy on simply understanding her prose, Henley only proves her own pretentiousness.

Finishing "In the River Sweet" requires one to wade through nearly three-hundred pages of under-edited, overripe writing. Those who desire an understanding of the consequences of the Vietnam War would be better served by speaking directly to a Vietnam vet or visiting the Wall in Washington, D.C. Patricia Henley's greatest transgression against that divisive and still-upsetting war is to make it boring and trivial. Those who experienced it directly and who still suffer its legacy deserve much, much more than what she delivers.