Deliverance Turns 40

Dwight Garner has a piece in today's New York Times commemorating the fortieth anniversary of James Dickey's masterpiece, Deliverance. He writes that "the book's anniversary shouldn't slip by unnoticed." I agree.

Like many people, I discovered Dickey's brutal novel after watching John Boorman's even more brutal film version. And like many readers, I suspect that I had a hard time seeing the book clearly. I needed to get past the infamous rape scene before I could appreciate Dickey's artistry and ambition. Garner describes the book's strange power this way:

“Deliverance” is the kind of novel few serious writers attempt any longer, a book about wilderness and survival whose DNA contains shards of both “Heart of Darkness” and “Huckleberry Finn.” It tells the story of four mild, middle-class men from suburban Atlanta who embark on a canoe trip, snaking down a remote Georgia river that will soon disappear beneath a dam. In the woods they find boiling rapids and two sinister mountain men. Before the novel is over, the carnage is nearly complete: three men have been crudely buried, one has been raped, and the survivors have had the bark peeled from their modern sensibilities.

It doesn't surprise me that Dickey has fallen out of literary fashion; as an outsized personality concerned with elemental questions of good and evil, he is easy to dismiss as a stereotype—"a deep-fried Norman Mailer," in Garner's words. But I suspect that most of Dickey's critics are concocting flimsy excuses not to take his novel seriously. "Deliverance" remains a deeply disturbing work and most of us would rather not be disturbed. Which was exactly Dickey's point. 

The Poacher's Son in the Maine Sportsman

I've been reading the Maine Sportsman for years and depend on it to keep me up to date with Maine outdoor news. I've also learned a ton about becoming a better fly fisher, hunter, and guide (Ken Allen's "Fly Box" has never steered me wrong). So it's a genuine honor to be reviewed in its pages by George Smith, the outgoing director of the Sportsman Alliance of Maine no less. Scroll down to the bottom of the "September Almanac" and you'll read:

The Poacher’s Son, an exceptional read, includes great characters and a terrific plot. It’s a page turner for sure....

There’s been a transition in the mystery fiction world from the day when plot was king, to today when characterization is the most important ingredient in a successful mystery novel.

Doiron has one foot in each camp. His primary character, a Maine game warden, is carefully and accurately drawn. As an observer of the Maine Warden Service for the past 18 years in my capacity as executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, I find Doiron’s presentation of his game warden, Mike Bowditch, spot on, from Bowditch’s frightening encounter with a wounded bear to the complaint against him from a disgruntled boater who received a citation for not having a life jacket on his kid.

I purchased the book because the main character was a game warden. I read it quickly, over a 48-hour period, because the plot grabbed me from the opening chapter....

Although Doiron agrees he’s lucky to get his first novel published, you’ll be the lucky one if you buy it and read it. 

I think my lucky steak is unbroken.

Nature Naivete

There's a widely read article in today's New York Times about people who are getting themselves into dangerous situations because they're venturing without preparation into wild places and then counting on their cell phones, GPS units, and personal satellite messaging devices to bail them out of trouble. The anecdotes are, frankly, jaw-dropping:

People with cellphones call rangers from mountaintops to request refreshments or a guide; in Jackson Hole, Wyo., one lost hiker even asked for hot chocolate.

A French teenager was injured after plunging 75 feet this month from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon when he backed up while taking pictures. And last fall, a group of hikers in the canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers explained that their water supply “tasted salty.”

“Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,” said Jackie Skaggs, spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

“Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them,” Ms. Skaggs said. “The answer is that you are up there for the night.”

Talk to any Registered Maine Guide and you'll hear similar anecdotes about clueless urbanites lighting campfires with kerosene and approaching skittish moose to get close-up snapshots. Tenderfeet have always been with us and always will be. One of my favorite short stories, Jack London's harrowing "To Build a Fire," is the tale of a newcomer to the Yukon who simply has no idea what a fool he is until he's literally freezing to death. John Krakauer's Into the Wild offers a contemporary take on this same old story.

The larger issue is our society's increasing detachment from nature. When you are unfamiliar with a thing—a river, an animal, a storm—it's easy to misjudge it. You bring preconceptions based on televised fantasies to matters of life and death (the news that two young people died mimicking the fraud that is "Man vs. Wild" is heartbreaking). It's yet another reason why I urge parents to read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.

I feel sorry for National Park rangers who are forced to offer remedial educations to stranded hikers who should have learned basic life lessons when they were children.

Mental Health Break

There are days in a magazine editor's life when you don't see the sunlight, and this was almost one of them for me. Work kept me in the office for close to eight hours. The phone kept ringing, email poured continually into my inbox, instant messages were constant distractions. It was only toward the end of the afternoon that my wife emailed to say that a friend of ours had spotted a rufous hummingbird at her feeder. 

Maine has only a single native species of hummingbird—the ruby-throated—so this sighting was of real significance. Rufous hummingbirds normally spend their summers in the Pacific Northwest, meaning this little guy was seriously off course.

As busy as I was, I decided to sneak out for a few minutes with my binoculars. When I arrived at our friend's house, no one was home, but the feeders were filled with birds of all kinds—chickadees, goldfinches, titmice, nuthatches. And yes, a rufous hummingbird, too:

Standing outside, watching this wayward bird sipping sugar water from the feeder, I felt a sense of calm that had eluded me all day. When I returned to the office, I found that a friend had emailed me a link to a story in today's New York Times. "Your Brain on Computers: Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain" by Matt Richtel recounts a trip a team of brain experts made rafting the San Juan River in southern Utah:

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects...

The men drink Tecate beer and talk about the brain. They are thinking about a seminal study from the University of Michigan that showed people can better learn after walking in the woods than after walking a busy street.

The study indicates that learning centers in the brain become taxed when asked to process information, even during the relatively passive experience of taking in an urban setting. By extension, some scientists believe heavy multitasking fatigues the brain, draining it of the ability to focus.

Some of the scientists were unconvinced by the University of Michigan study. But I knew from my experience with the hummingbird that fresh air can be a balm for the wayward mind.

100 Must-Reads

I've written dismissively about NPR's list of Top 100 Thrillers. I have nothing against popularity contests, but I felt the NPR list slighted too many of the all-time masterpieces of suspense.

For that reason I was delighted to stumble across Thrillers: 100 Must Reads in (where else?) my local library. Editors David Morrell and Hank Wagner asked contemporary thriller authors — everyone from Lee Child to my friend Tess Gerritsen — to recommend their favorite stories and novels. The result is a great list that includes both many of my personal influences as well as a number of titles I haven't read yet but definitely plan on buying.

The books aren't ranked from one to one hundred but instead are organized by publication date:

 

  1. Theseus and the Minotaur (1500 B.C.)
  2. Homer's The Iliad and The Odyessey (7th Century B.C.)
  3. Beowulf (between 700 and 1000 A.D.)
  4. William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1605-1606)
  5. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719-1722)
  6. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)
  7. James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
  8. Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
  9. Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1845)
  10. Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860)
  11. Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (1874)
  12. H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885)
  13. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886)
  14. Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)
  15. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)
  16. H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898)
  17. Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901)
  18. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)
  19. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902)
  20. Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903)
  21. Jack London's The Sea Wolf (1904)
  22. Baroness Emma Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
  23. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
  24. Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger (1913)
  25. John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
  26. E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation (1920)
  27. Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924)
  28. W. Somserset Maugham's Ashenden or The British Agent (1928)
  29. P.G. Wodehouse's Summer Lightning (1929)
  30. Edgar Wallace's King Kong (1933)
  31. Lester Dent's Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1933)
  32. James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
  33. Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938)
  34. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939)
  35. Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939)
  36. Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male (1939)
  37. Helen Macinnes's Above Suspicion (1941)
  38. Cornell Woolrich's "Rear Window" (1942)
  39. Vera Caspery's Laura (1943)
  40. Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock (1946)
  41. Graham Greene's The Third Man (1950)
  42. Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train (1950)
  43. Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night (1951)
  44. Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952)
  45. Ernest K. Gann's The High and the Mighty (1953)
  46. Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)
  47. Hammond Innes's The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1956)
  48. Ian Fleming's From Russia, with Love (1957)
  49. Alistair MacLean's The Guns of Navarone (1957)
  50. Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1959)
  51. Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File (1962)
  52. Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey's Seven Days in May (1962)
  53. Lionel Davidson's The Rose of Tibet (1962)
  54. Richard Stark's The Hunter aka Point Blank (1962)
  55. John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
  56. Wilbur Smith's When the Lion Feeds (1964)
  57. Evelyn Anthony's The Rendezvous (1967)
  58. Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969)
  59. James Dickey's Deliverance (1970)
  60. Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971)
  61. Brian Garfield's Death Wish (1972)
  62. David Morrell's First Blood (1972)
  63. Trevanian's The Eiger Sanction (1972)
  64. Charles McCarry's The Tears of Autumn (1974)
  65. Peter Benchley's Jaws (1974)
  66. William Goldman's Marathon Man (1974)
  67. James Grady's Six Days of the Condor (1974)
  68. Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed (1975)
  69. Joseph Wambaugh's The Choirboys (1975)
  70. Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic! (1976)
  71. Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1976)
  72. Robin Cook's Coma (1977)
  73. Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle (1978)
  74. Ross Thomas's Chinaman's Chance (1978)
  75. John D. MacDonald's The Green Ripper (1979)
  76. Justin Scott's The Shipkiller (1979)
  77. Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity (1980)
  78. Eric Van Lustbader's The Ninja (1980)
  79. Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (1981)
  80. Jack Ketchum's Off Season (1981)
  81. Thomas Perry's The Butcher Boy (1982)
  82. Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October (1984)
  83. F. Paul Wilson's The Tomb (1984)
  84. Andrew Vachss's Flood (1985)
  85. Stephen King's Misery (1987)
  86. Nelson DeMille's The Charm School (1988)
  87. Dean Koontz's Watchers (1988)
  88. Katherine Neville's The Eight (1988)
  89. Peter Straub's Koko (1988)
  90. John Grisham's The Firm (1991)
  91. R.L. Stine's Silent Night (1991)
  92. James Patterson's Along Came a Spider (1992)
  93. Stephen Hunter's Point of Impact (1993)
  94. John Lescroat's The 13th Juror (1994)
  95. Sandra Brown's The Witness (1995)
  96. David Baldacci's Absolute Power (1996)
  97. Gayle Lynds's Masquerade (1996)
  98. Lee Child's Killing Floor (1997)
  99. Jeffrey Deaver's The Bone Collector (1997)
  100. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003)

 

Which famous contemporary author recommended which of the above books and why? You'll have to read Thrillers: 100 Must Reads to find out.