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The Waters of Kronos

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In this haunting, often beautiful novel, Conrad Richter writes of the journey of John Donner, who goes back to the town where he was born, hoping to find the meaning of a deep malaise. If he can only return to the past, he feels he might be free. But the quest seems futile. The town he seeks lies at the bottom of a great modern dam made by the River Kronos.


How he is drawn back through the waters of Kronos, Time, into the past forms the narrative of John Donner's classic journey. He finds himself in his own clear, light-filled world of youth at a moment of double crisis in the lives of his richly varied family, the Donners, Morgans, and Scarletts. But they are still young. John Donner is an old man. When he tries to re-enter the old intimate family relationships, he is rejected as a stranger, even by the boy-he-was as they stand face to face. Only his mother, from whom he holds himself until the last, cannot fail him, he thinks. Surely she will know him and receive him into the old heretofore never failing love.

The Waters of Kronos is a haunting novel about memory, loss, nostalgia, and the pitfalls of hope. The very premise, so promisingly delivered, bears fruit in unexpected ways: John Donner imagines that his inner unease is from the distance between him and his long dead father. In his feverish imagination he sees his father menacingly approaching his sick bed, but then realizes he was wrong. His father was not the subject of his life long fear: it was existence itself. The very physical fact of living, with its accumulated disappointments and losses, its fears and anxieties, is the real source of anxiety. And it is inescapable: neither a retreat into fantasy nor a recreation of the past into art can alleviate it. In the end, this masterfully written novella comes to grips with this unsettling fact: people must live with life as it is given.

This book by Richter which won the National Book Award in 1961 remains for me THE masterpiece of modern American literature.

Elegaic in its scope, Richter in Waters of Kronos captures the nostalgic malaise of the dwindling Eisenhower years as the American Spirit fails to come to terms with the realization that our rural Americanness of closely knit families, hidden local secrets, and apple pie abundance had been forfeited under the swelling waters of Modern Time -- those backed-up waters created by the dams of the Tennessee valley and the creation of the interstate highway system. In raising this awareness in the novella-like dreams of a man affected by the stroke of insight, Richter juxaposes the era of headless horsemen and settling pilgrims with the impersonal modern existentialism that arbitrarily guards the cemetaries of our memories.

If there is any book of American literature that should be mandatory reading, this is the one.

I am currently reading, as I get to them, the winners of the National Book Award which I haven't yet read. This book won the 1961 award and I found it an eerily moving book, which really caught me up after I read for a bit. It tells of John Donner revisiting his boyhood home, and while fantastic it has none of the things I so often find irritatin in "fantasy" books. I was powerfully affected by this great simple story.