The Trouble With Bill Briggum's Great American Novel
Three things about Bill Briggum annoyed his wife: he spat when lacing his boots; he said and wrote the word 'ornery' too much; and he laughed at books and songs that oughtn't be laughed at.
Bill Briggum's novels all begin the same, with natural Americana—sunsets, clouds, prairies, woods, rivers, farms—in almost purple prose. He zooms out near Whitman-wide for a few pages and then snaps in close to the woes of an old midwest preacher or Arkansan mayor or some other American character he puts through the wringer of loss and heartbreak for 200 pages before closing out with a chapter of nature stuff again. Three things about him annoyed his wife, Noreen: he spat when lacing his boots; he said and wrote the word 'ornery' too much; and he laughed at books and songs that oughtn't be laughed at. But, unlike his characters, he didn't chase skirts, and his novels sold well enough to keep the house in order and allow for some shopping on the yearly trip to Chicago.
It was his thirteenth novel, Wandering to River, that started the trouble. It seemed to begin like the rest, an elegy to the old country that walked the line between schlock and American sublime, but the characters, two sons of a trapper and an Indian working as stevedores in St. Louis, forgot they were characters and kept making choices that cut against the structure of the fiction. The prose would erode when they got close the river, and the characters' movement through time drove at least one close-reading narratologist mad. Wandering made less sense each time you read it but left a few itches that couldn't be scratched except by reading it. Were they unloading ships or roving unnamed hills? How'd the river come alive? What'd "speak" or "cause" or "kill" come to mean? By the closing chapter the stevedore brothers resembled an indeterminate dyad who dreamt of an unnamed landscape so akin to the landscape of the reader it was as if the dyad's dreams produced anew the reader’s world. When Biggum's editor read it for the first time he said, "Dammit, Biggum," but then read it three more times that week and tried to drive to Ohio to see Bill instead of calling.
I'm sure the editor’s wreck was an accident, like Noreen's pregnancy then, at an age when neither she nor he thought such a thing would ever happen. Bill and the stevedore brothers started drinking on the same day at that heavenly hour of midwest sky with the cicada racket going and the river flowing like the old Ephesian said it would.