The difficult journey home is at the heart of River City One, a novel about a Marine returned to civilian life.
River City One, by John J. Waters (Knox Press, 256 pp., $18.99)
T o hear “River City” announced over the ship’s intercom is to know personal despair without the reassurance of its purpose. That pair of words heralds the immediate cessation of any communication with the outside world. The ship’s internet, email, AT&T payphones, and all other means of telling one’s wife, mother, or siblings why one has stopped responding mid conversation are crashingly forestalled, and the average sailor or Marine never knows why or for how long the abortion of speech will continue. Like a mason at Babel, the enlisted man is suddenly altered in his capacity to express himself. All at once, it’s just you and 5,000 souls aboard the ship — a mute, steel-clad leviathan that defies God by swimming above the waterline.
John J. Waters, in using the term for the title of his latest novel, River City One, has managed to further this concept beyond one man’s time in service. The novel considers the individual for whom River City is never secured (that is, never lifted). What if such a man takes his DD-214 through the gates into civilian life, but like a ship of one at a remove from shore, he can only observe from afar the relationships, priorities, and pleasures of everything on the other side of the brow?
Waters’s book has been compared to Melville’s Moby-Dick, insofar as the Pequod’s and American empire’s demise are the result of their leaders’ vanity and rage — which produce men like the book’s protagonist, John Walker. (Coincidentally, the bookmark that holds its place in my copy is a gift from a friend, a souvenir from Melville’s home, Arrowhead.) A Marine turned attorney who has married a beautiful American girl and produced a son, Walker is a material success and a miserable man.
Everyone wants him, at least at first, but his thoughts and passions may as well be in a Faraday cage.
Professionally, spiritually, and sexually, John has been rendered insensate, but his animating spirit howls for the beautiful. Like a child at a carnival, he pursues sound and color — the emotions he himself can’t manufacture — because he knows that the density of life is greater in certain places and should be drawn into oneself whenever possible lest one grow to despise existence and home.
John Walker, who shares the author’s Christian name (and a great deal more, if the startlingly vivid descriptions of post-service life are any indication — a scene at a party has a Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse quality that should be studied in literature classes for its understanding of the base, manipulative motivations of the guests and host), is an off-putting man — intentionally so, it seems. The author, aware of the American public’s blissfully ignorant affection for the Marine, offers a protagonist who reviles that instinct and the patronizing manifestations it presents in his every day.
A moment at a dinner party illustrates well the difference between legitimate interest in the wages of military intervention and service and the perfunctory nod toward such while immediately trivializing it for social advancement:
The small man blushed.
“I was a squid, if you can believe that. Petty officer in the navy, at your service. Could barely put a Band-Aid on someone without getting queasy and there I was, didn’t have the stomach to be a school nurse, much less a medic on patrol through the jungle! Now look at me. Forty years old with an ex-wife, two sons, and one helluva husband later, and — ta-da!”
“So, you were drafted —” I started to ask when another man touched the sleeve of my jacket.
“It’s a wonderfully peculiar story, don’t you think?” the other man said. “Terry and I are just exasperatingly busy right now. We’re performing total reconstructive surgery on a Georgian revival just around the corner. Maybe you know it?”
I looked up and scanned the white plaster ceiling for a hint as to whether I should admit I knew nothing about this neighborhood or play along.
“Actually, is that the one —”
“That is the one! The remodel has become such an organic extension of my inner artistic vision. My — rather our — goal is to rescue the whole darn thing and turn the basement into a sort of apart —”
The novel that River City One puts me in mind of is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The protagonists of both novels despair at their inability to communicate with those who should be their peers. (Huxley’s is another “John,” and both share this characteristic with their New Testament namesake.) They cannot imagine sharing the vulgar materialism of those around them and are incapable of returning to what should feel like home (for John Walker, the ranks; for John the Savage, pre-modernity). Instead, they go, metaphorically for Waters’s John and literally for Huxley’s, to the lighthouse, to sanctuary. For John Walker, this figurative location is one of paternal protection — whether he’ll substitute a mortal father’s embrace for an eternal one through that shrouded aperture a handgun offers is left an open question. For the American veteran or those who wish to understand the multitudes within men like John Walker, the novel is a testament to what can’t be said. Such men are mutes who must relearn life’s language. They need someone to get through to them and impress upon them that River City is secured.
“Yes, yes, but is it any good?” one asks after almost any review, especially the highfalutin ones. I reckon it is, having consumed the book in three sittings. The pacing was purposeful and eschewed self-indulgent asides. The story is earnest and grim, while specific chapters will agitate the reader’s imagination long after he’s forgotten the title or author’s name. It’s a fine book and one of the first I’d recommend to those looking to understand a veteran’s mind.
Ultimately, Waters has managed to say his piece and fall silent, allowing the reader to do with the information what he will. Bravo Zulu.