River

River by Clausen, Lowen. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9780972581127.

From a remote corner of a vanishing American landscape, a bereaved father begins a journey down the river that has been all but inseparable from his life. At the river’s origin the shallow stream courses through the ranch where he was born. It is where he fell in love the first time and where the ashes of his son have been poured. “Now, before it’s too late, before I lose the will to do anything, I am leaving this land to follow the sticks I dropped into the river so long ago.” But this man’s passage along the interlacing rivers to the ocean will not be simple or disconnected from the life he leaves behind. His estranged son’s last angry words echo in his memory, and despite moments of pure concentration on the waters ahead, the solitary voyager finds the past seeping into his thoughts and dreams. In River, novelist Lowen Clausen has created a story of deep beauty and seriousness, in which he weaves together the complex threads of one man’s search for wholeness. Clausen’s rich, elegiac prose becomes its own landscape and river, transporting the reader on a journey through despair and doubt into discovery.