Up the Creek Book Club

The River King

by Alice Hoffman

March 2002

Synopsis

"The setting is Hadden, Massachusetts, which is also the name of the town's elite boarding school, and the river that runs through them both. Here we encounter a large and compelling cast of characters, both "townies" and Hadden School faculty and students, all of them caught up in a mystery that revolves around a death that seems to be a suicide. In what often feels like literary sleight-of-hand, Hoffman brings her players on stage to play their scenes with such grace that you almost forget that you haven't known them for years.

The story is stitched together by the threads of two loves. One thread connects local cop Abel Grey, a tall, handsome loner and a self-confessed emotional recluse, to photography teacher Betsy Chase, the woman who unwittingly brings him out of hiding. The other thread connects two students, Carlin Leander, a fine looking, dirt-poor, independent-thinker-of-a-girl attending Hadden on a swimming scholarship, and Gus Pierce, a hopelessly homely renegade of a boy, half Holden Caulfield and half Borstal Boy. Of equal importance to the novel are the ghosts who haunt this story, including Annie Howe, the long-suffering wife of a former headmaster at the school, and Abel's kid brother, whose death at 17 was also suspicious. But most importantly, there is the "recently deceased," who shows up in Betsy Chase's photographs as a shimmering aura.

Abel, Betsy, Carlin, and Gus face a number of whale-size moral dilemmas in The River King, moral concerns that are at once contemporary and timeless. But finally it is the river itself -- or perhaps in the very turn of phrase Hoffman means us to make, King River -- who stands sentinel over all the human strivings and failures enacted along its banks and in its tumbling stream. It is in this river that, as Ishmael says, "We see ourselves...the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." (Editor--Susan Thames)

Book Club Rating and Comments

Almost everyone liked this book. We felt it was a pleasant, quick read that didn't follow the beaten path. Someone mentioned that not everything was resolved in the end, but we discussed that perhaps that was the point. Things seldom are in real life.

If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.