Margo Crane is 16 and she lives on the bank of the Stark river in Michigan. To her, this is paradise and she wants to be nowhere else. Her heroine is Annie Oakley and she wants to be just as tough and resourceful. Unfortunately she live in the 20thC, not the 19th and, at only 16 years of age and effectively orphaned, the river is a dangerous place to be alone.
Margo is, however, resourceful as well as tough. And she's promiscuous, able to take advantage of the weakness of the men she meets along the way. Her moral code is very much her own, and she refines it in her own way as she inches her way along the river, making a life as best she can while she searches for an unknown future.
There is no tidy end to this American parable, it just reaches a point where we leave Margo where we feel she has learned enough to be able to build a life from which she can survive, rather than be more at risk of being swallowed up and disappear, as she might have been earlier in the story.
This story is rather like a lengthened version, in prose, of a Johnny Cash song, a mixture of melancholy, defiance and joyfulness. Slow paced but with its share of brutality, I enjoyed reading this slice of northern backwoods Americana.
No comments:
Post a Comment