Lily of the Valley

Run, River is set in the Sacramento Valley, California. It tells the story of Everett McClellan’s marriage to Lily Knight. The story takes as its point of departure Everett’s murder of Ryder Charming, one of Lily’s lovers; we are made to understand that the history of the McClellan and Knight families, who seem to have lived in an indolent splendour in the Valley since the nineteenth century, has led remorselessly to this fatal incident. The narrative regresses in time to return again, at the end, to the moment of the murder.

The action shifts between two worlds: the Valley where the Knights and the McClellans seem to be well-established structures in the landscape, but of whose imminent erosion the reader is uncomfortably aware; and opposed to it the new, prosperous California, which, in the persons of such characters as Ryder Channing, is waiting to devour the old.

No sooner do Everett and Lily settle down than their marriage begins to suffer.

The serious rupture occurs when Everett goes away during the war. By the time he returns Lily is pregnant. This crisis, however, is surmounted with magnanimous under-standing on the part of Everett; and yet, in spite of his generosity and Lily’s successful abortion, it is clear to each that their marriage is doomed. Lily had not wanted to be unfaithful; in fact, there are few things she had ever really wanted to do. Even her marriage, which she had kept postponing, took place only because Everett called her early one morning and drove her to Nevada. This flaw in Lily’s character – her habit of passive involvement – is central to the story, Everett’s weakness is that he expects life to follow a fixed pattern – the one he has been used to on the land. His philosophy makes no allowances for adventurers like Ryder Channing, and consequently he is compelled to murder him. Both Everett and Lily are pushed into a despair which they can neither explain to each other nor come to terms with, and consequently both are pushed more and more away from each other. The final tragedy comes with the inevitability of a rain-storm at the end of a day of dark clouds. Lily sums up the hopelessness which they feel when she shares a moment of truth with her daughter:

“Go to sleep, baby”, she said, unable to explain to Julie. any more than she could explain to herself, just where the trouble had begun.

The simple language is heavily burdened with the overtones of tragedy. Run, River is a beautifully told first novel. Written in prose both witty and imaginative, it has too a high level of intelligence.

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