Run River by Joan Didion

She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States Senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes; the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all. They had been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mother's dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: a moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.

Joan Didion's first novel kept her close to home: Run River is about the wealthy families along the Sacramento River who can trace their ancestry back to California's pioneers, who braved a new land, tamed it, and then settled down to work it. The married couple at the heart of the novel are Everett and Lily McClellan, distant cousins who are both descendants of these people. Their attraction toward each other is based on this explicitly; when a young Everett looks at Lily, he knows that she is the kind of woman who he can "bring back to the ranch," who will anchor him and tie him to the place that is his inheritance. But the marriage is a poor one: the two cling desperately to each other and then push each other away. Everett abandons Lily and their young children to join the army when World War II breaks out and Lily, feeling abandoned, has a brief affair with a man she hates. The pregnancy and ensuing abortion sent the marriage hurtling headlong into ruin. When the book opens, an older Everett has just shot and killed Lily's lover, Ryder Channing; the novel then backtracks to fill in the gaps and tell us how they found themselves in such a violent place.

What is Run River's conception of those California pioneers? The blurb for Elaine Castillo's upcoming book of essays (which I'd like to read) encourages us to, among other things, reject the "settler colonialism" of Didion. Certainly, being the sons and daughters of pioneers have done Lily and Everett no good. There's a hollowness at the heart of their inheritance, a sense that they have not deserved what they have received because they don't know how to keep it, though Everett is, at heart, a farmer who knows how to work his hops crops from the ground. The passage I quoted above makes me wonder if Didion is suggesting that the virtues of the pioneers--I don't know, adventurousness, bravery, a longing for new things--curdle into vices when they become bound to one place, and that Lily and Everett might have been better, happier people in another time and place.

It's actually Martha, Everett's sister and Ryder's initial lover, who seems the most wrecked; her desperate attachment to the uncouth man seems like a consequence, sometimes, of having nothing better to do, no other purpose or desire. When he leaves her, she--spoiler alert--goes out to the river in a boat during a flood and drowns, dying in the very place she should have known better (and perhaps she did). Martha's death reverberates with the death of her and Everett's father, drowned in the same river in a car accident that kills him and his lover, another scion of a river family. In a way, California kills them. Ryder himself is a charming lout and grifter from Tennessee always trying to get in on the ground floor of some money-making scheme. Is he a representation of some non-Californian value, a capitalist who runs in on the heels of the people who made California great? Or is he a representation of those pioneers, who came in from the East as well, certain they could make the valley a Paradise for themselves, and then shut the gate?

Run River is just okay as a novel. The most extraordinary thing it does, I think, is make Didion seem sort of human. The qualities that make her later fiction--especially the crackle of dialogue between people who both hate and need each other--are here, but the Sacramento story clearly has a special resonance for Didion herself that doesn't quite make it to the page. In the end, River Run is a familiar kind of mid-century novel, one about rich people doing bad things to each other. (Why are rich people always so sad?)