Boyce Upholt The Great River

It’s a cliché to say that a place can act as a character in a novel.  Yet when we want to understand the character of a place, we look to the history genre to get the goods. With The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, Boyce Upholt effectively upends that tradition. Eschewing timeline chronology and embracing the quirky, ever-shifting nature of his subject, Upholt offers us what one might call a biography of the Mississippi.  It’s a fast, fun reading experience that examines its subject with a seriousness and subjectivity to craft a compelling narrative that brings the river to life.  Unsurprisingly, the Mississippi has a lot to say.

The subtitle of the book, “The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi” is important. This is a story about a character, the Mississippi River, under constant assault from humans who tried to live nearby.  Upholt tells the story of the civilizations that ruled the wild land long before settlers arrived to begin the real assault.  While we’ve been informed of the various “mound builders” who came before settlement, Upholt does a wonderful job describing the bustling cities created alongside the vast floodplains.  But these cities disappeared, as did the people who built them.  

Upholt describes the battle of man versus landscape as America pushed westward with narrative expertise.  What nature had on offer was inconvenient for men.  The serpentine curves and floodplains made travel difficult and economic exploitation more expensive.  Woven onto this story is the story of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the moderately mad men who lead them.  The rise of the steamboat, then the railroad, all play out as the hubris of man pitted against the forces of nature.  Human victories were fleeting and often pyrrhic.  

America’s attempts to tame the Mississippi are intertwined with America’s attempts to tame its own citizens. In the midst of this muddy battle, Upholt crafts scenes that will etch themselves in the readers’ memories; a Spanish expedition obliterated by a native American army, plantations and slaves slogging in the mud, maleficent towers of aging chemical plants dominating an otherwise empty, sodden landscape.

Through all of this, the Mississippi defines itself.  We may build levees that challenge the Great Wall of China, but they’re our own mounds in the swamp.  Our cities bustle so long as the river permits.  The Great River, indeed. Upholt manages to usurp the power of this river, to channel it into his narrative.  We read, and are swept along, as our attempts to control and civilize the river are swept away.

Boyce Upholt has spent serious time on the river.  You cannot befriend it, but he describes in our interview how he captured it, not with bulldozers and explosives, but the power of prose.  You can download our chat here, or watch the sun set on civilization while you listen below.  When the interview is done, when the file has played out, listen to the silence.  The river is still flowing.

Avik Jain Chatlani This Country Is No Longer Yours

How might one write about history, in a manner to best convey how an individual feels going about one’s life, while a very specific series of so-called historical events transpires?  I’ve read and enjoyed lots of non-fiction histories; an event happens to, around, or is described by the author, then another.  I’ve also read lots of fictional historical novels, which follow a similar plan, but use characters and even events created by the author.  The order of events and characters is easily sussed in both fiction and non-fiction.  Reading the finished work provides a pleasing clarity.  Story is sorted from noise.  Even if disorder prevails, so does understanding, in theory.  But in a world of constant, whirling chaos, are clarity, understanding and pleasure appropriate, applicable goals?

Avik Jain Chatlani is a historian. His novel, This Country Is No Longer Yours, is set in Peru, during the time of The Shining Path’s “revolutionary” war and the rule of Alberto Fujimori.  But in order to convey the impression of those places and that time, Chatlani eschews the narrative norms of both historical fact and fiction.  With the lightest of hands, Chatlani offers a straightforward, no special-effects vision of life amidst a swirl of chaos, violence, and unchecked human excess.  It feels like a series of vivid nightmares and daydreams, hope, self-destruction and despair jumbled together almost without reason. 

It feels like life, here and now.

We start with a student, sent by his professor to see “The end of the world.”  If that feels familiar, it should.  As Chatlani moves from story to story, a powerful picture of a nation descending slowly and often, it seems, deliberately, into hell emerges.  Evacuated cities, now home to macaws released by the fleeing citizens who once kept them as pets.  The fantasy of a socialist republic imposed by violent murderers with guns.  Educated men with reasonable ideas rendered senseless by poverty and ineptitude.  A lone soldier in love, contemplating the unthinkable.  Chatlani’s individual stories blend and blur, slowly turning gritty reality into all-too-surreal horror.  History is a nightmare you wake up to, not from.

This Country Is No Longer Yours is written with great precision, as if by a surgeon who must perform a hail-Mary operation with no anesthetic.  The patient may survive, but won’t thank you.  It’s powerful and compelling in its willingness to use the toolkit of experimental fiction without dandying up the novel.  Here’s an entirely original take on history, offering realistic events, realistically described, but set up like a series of unhappy dreams.  This is history as it happens and as it feels.  This is a country in South America, early in the 21st century.  If This Country Is No Longer Yours sounds like a description of where you live, right now – it is.

Avik Jain Chatlani does not look or act or speak like a historian.  He apparently uses a robust education to replay VHS tapes of his youth as prose, and we’re the better for it.  You can hear our conversation here, or listen below.  Keep alert to your surroundings.  It is every bit as dangerous as you imagine.