Review: The Language of Trees by Ilie Ruby

Three young children, two girls and a boy, get in a canoe unsupervised one evening on Canadaigua Lake, one of the finger lakes in upstate New York. The weather worsens, the wind kicks up waves, the paddle is lost, and only two of the children return. The youngest, the boy, is not to seen again for a year, when his body finally surfaces.

Thus begins The Language of Trees by Ilie Ruby, set around Canadaigua Lake and some of its long-time residents. There is Grant Shongo, returning to his family's cabin for the first time in years in order to recover from his wife's leaving him after three miscarriages. Also returning is Echo O'connell, who was brought up on the lake by her distant cousin Joseph O'Connell, owner of the local general store, after her parents were killed in a car crash. They return to confront the wreckage left by the canoe accident long ago—Grant's cabin haunted by the boy's ghost; the boy's mother and sisters, all struggling and haunted in their own ways—and each other. They had been inseparable as teenagers but had not spoken in years. Through it all runs the legacy and lore of the Seneca Indians, who once lived around the lake and whose spirit wields its influence still.

The Language of Trees has some wonderful moments and some suspenseful ones as well. Overall, it is a lovely story of love, loss, and redemption. Most of the characters are very human and lovable; only one is truly evil and turns out to be the source of much of pain in the book. While I enjoyed it, I often found the beautiful language it is written in getting in the way of the story; it is so pretty at times, it is distracting. (Ilie Ruby is also a painter.) The lake is given too many colors, the natural world takes too many actions (trees draw the dew across the grass one moment and are breathless the next). Call me a philistine, but I believe literary images should be rock-hard, draw crisp pictures in the mind, and above all serve the story, rather than be impressionistic, drawing attention to themselves.

Once again I find myself wishing for an editor who would be a task master, one who can see the story as a sculptor envisions his creation in the block of granite and is willing to chip away at some beautiful stuff to bring out what's hidden. I found The Language of Trees to be just too fuzzy to get a rave review from me, and for that I am sorry, because it is truely a lovely story.

Review: So Cold the River by Michael Koryta

Eric Shaw is a washed-up filmmaker who has returned to Chicago from LA and has been relegated to making memorial videos for funerals for a living. The fact that he sometimes picks up on things no one else does -- strong feelings about the past that seem to be messages from the dead -- helps him in his current line of work, but otherwise is just embarrassing. After a client is struck by one of his observations, however, he is offered a video job that takes him to new psychic heights and incredible danger.

The job involves digging up the past of Campbell Bradford, a dying nonagenarian who quietly amassed a tremendous fortune. Eric is to go to the adjacent towns of French Lick and West Badan, Indiana, where Bradford grew up, and is handed a bottle of mineral water from the area, a curio that Bradford had with him his whole life but would say nothing about. The bottle is oddly cold regardless of the room temperature. Eric decides to taste it, and it make him violently ill. He takes the bottle with him when he goes south, and it becomes downright frosty. He also decides to taste it again and this time finds it sweet, drinking much of it. Each time he drinks, he has visions of a man in a bowler hat who appears to be from the late 1920's.

In between swigs, Eric has withdrawl symptoms from the water, but he finds that if he drinks mineral water from the 1920's from a different bottle, the symptoms are contained. While dealing with his reactions to the water and researching Bradford, he runs in to some interesting characters: the brother of a famous basketball player who is researching the Black history of the area; an elderly woman who is a tornado spotter; and Bradford's good-for-nothing grandson. It soon becomes clear that the story of Campbell Bradford from Chicago is not quite the same as the Campbell Bradford from French Lick, the weather is getting worse, and the man in the bowler hat becomes more than a vision; he is a ghost trying to manipulate the present. And in the midst of all this is the newly-restored historic West Baden Hotel. It is, itself, a character in the book, lovingly described and the center of much of the action.

So Cold the River is an unusual ghost story. Haunted mineral water? Now that's different. The characters were more-or-less likable and believable (although Eric is whiney and pretty stupid to drink the mineral water a second time after it makes his ill the first), but the book was just too long, and the fascinating denouement was marred by inconsistencies. At one point on character is so injured he can hardly move and within an hour be rushes to help Eric, who is within sight but a distance away over difficult terrain. Sorry, adrenaline can only do so much, in my opinion.

I just didn't quite get how the haunted mineral water worked, either. OK, a guy with psychic leanings drinks the stuff and has very realistic visions of a ghost. But why does he have horrible physical symptoms that are only cured by drinking more of the stuff? Why does drinking other water from that era hold the symptoms off and lessen the visions? Unnecessary.

And that is exactly my beef with this 500+ page book; so much of it seemed unnecessary. Koryta confesses it started out as a novela and just kept going. There's nothing inherently wrong with starting that way, but finishing as well? Where was the editor? This narrative has too many characters, plot devices, and repetitive foreshadowing in the form of weather.

I bet if I were from Indiana and knew of the real West Badan Hotel, which sounds amazing, I would have been much more interested in this story. As it is, I am just a bit confounded and not in all interested should the haunted mineral water threaten the town of French Lick again.

See what The New York Times had to say about the book: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/books/01book.html