Reading OBOB Authors: Recursion and The River

One Book One Broomfield has introduced me to some authors I might never have encountered otherwise; two of these are Blake Crouch and Peter Heller, both of whom have new books out. The two books are both engaging, although in totally different ways.

Recursion 

Crouch's Recursion is a time travel tale but different than other such books I have read (and I have to admit, I haven't read that many) because people in this story travel only backward, have different lives when they travel, and, at some point in the future, can remember all of the lives. Aside from those who have created the time travel apparatus, people do not understand what has happened to create the conflicting memories--indeed, they think they have something called False Memory Syndrome (FMS)--and a suicide epidemic results.

The narrative is told from the viewpoints of two characters. New York police officer Barry Sutton  starts investigating FMS when he fails to prevent the suicide of a woman who is tormented by her memories of another life. Barry has also experienced tragedy--his teenage daughter was killed in a car accident and his marriage subsequently fell apart--and is open to return to the day of her death to prevent the accident. When he is afforded that opportunity, he enjoys his altered life until the day his wife and daughter remember the other life. At that point, his thinking about time travel changes.

The second protagonist is scientist Dr. Helena Smith, who is working on a device that will help people with Alzheimer's (including her mother) recover some of their memories. When a wealthy investor offers to underwrite her work, she is delighted until . . . no spoilers here.

Recursion bears some similarities to our 2017 OBOB selection by Crouch, Dark Matter. People have alternative lives--clearly a fascination for Crouch--but the focus is somewhat different, in that Recursion explores the functions of memory while Dark Matter looked at how the smallest decisions can change a person's life. Each book contains a device whose function is somewhat magical to this reader and which some more scientifically picky readers will likely find infeasible. And each book contains some violent scenes that I could have done without; I can't help wondering if Crouch was thinking about the TV/movie adaptation when he wrote those scenes.

In the midst of Recursion, I sometimes struggled to figure out what life someone was in (and why) but then remembered what my friend Suzy advised me when I was reading The Time-Traveler's Wife:  "Don't worry about the details; just let it flow." Hardline sci-fi people might have difficulty with that approach, but it allowed me to enjoy this book.

The River

Peter Heller wrote two books between our OBOB selection The Dog Stars and his latest release The River.  I was not overly fond of either The Painter or Celine, but The River lives up to that earlier work. Although The River is not set in a post-apocalyptic world as The Dog Stars was, it features men surviving in the outdoors as they battle nature and their fellow humans--and Heller writes about these themes exceedingly well.

Dartmouth roommates Jack and Wynn decide to take a canoe trip on the Maskwa River in northern Canada before they return to school in the fall. The two young men are different--tough guy Jack grew up on a ranch near Granby, Colorado, where his  mother was killed in a fall when he was a boy; Vermonter Wynn, while bigger, is more tender, perhaps because he grew up in an intact family that included a sister with cerebral palsy--but they share a love for the outdoors, fishing, and literature. The trip starts out as the idyllic trip they had imagined, but then it goes all Deliverance on them (that book/film is referenced more than once) as they encounter wildfire, a pair of drunk Texans, and a badly injured woman.

I can't say much more without veering into spoiler territory, so let me conclude by saying that The River is riveting.

Favorite Passages

Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human--the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

Blake Crouch, Recursion


He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that
seemed so lost and lonely so . . . what? Essential and lovely.

There's always relief in committing to a decision, even when there's no choice.

The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. I twas like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.

Peter Heller, The River