The Challenging Goodness of Brian Doyle’s Mink River

The Challenging Goodness of Brian Doyle’s Mink River
Oregon State University Press, 2010; 320 pp., $16.95

Brian Doyle situates his fictional town Mink River like the writer of Genesis situates Eden: amid four waters. Rivers in the case of Eden,“one muscular river, two shy little creeks, one ocean” in the case of Mink River. It is a place with “some odd sweet corners,” a talking crow named Moses, and a large cast of characters whose lives are woven together like a braid.

Given the novel’s lyricism, whimsy and evocative style, I have rarely found myself wanting to dislike a book more than I wanted to dislike Mink River. In the two weeks it took me to finish the novel, only half of me was reading it. The other half was busily building a case against it. Why so many storylines? Why so many lists? Is Doyle kidding with the talking bird? But toward the end of the book these two halves collided when Moses says this about the unique quality of crow stories: “When crows tell stories, stories tell us.”

This line was painful to read, partly because I’m skeptical of talking crows, but also because, as I completed my eye-roll, Brian Doyle looked up from the page and read me. And he used the beak of my least favorite character as his mouthpiece.

At this moment I realized the root of my discomfort: in Mink River, Brian Doyle makes goodness believable—profoundly believable, excruciatingly believable. And the problem with his believably rendered goodness is that it forced me to consider that my articulated beliefs about goodness are not fully compatible with my lived beliefs about goodness.

An explanation: When God created the universe he said that it was good. And when he created people he said they were very good. And I think this is all very well and good. Creation is good, people are good—yes and good and hallelujah.

But then came the fall, after which there was good and evil. God did not abandon his creation, though: through Christ he is ever redeeming and sanctifying it. Once again, I affirm all of this. Yes and good and hallelujah.

And yet… while reading Mink River I found myself having a real bone to pick with the way Doyle chose goodness to play the weight-bearing role in his novel. I was skeptical that the youngest character, Daniel, could survive his horrendous bicycle crash. I was mad that Cedar didn’t deal more harshly with Nicholas’s abusive father. I expected married Owen would have an affair with reckless Grace and this would be wrong but also satisfying because I was craving a villain and Grace seemed like a pretty good candidate.

But Doyle overturned my expectations by using these hardships to facilitate eucatastrophe instead of exploiting them for a more predictable dramatic effect. Daniel’s crash is frightening, but his parents and grandparents take it in stride. It does not lead to an existential crisis or to the family falling apart. And Nicholas’s abusive father goes unpunished, at least officially. We get no scenes of retribution, just a heartfelt confession and the undramatic consequence of his son choosing to live elsewhere. As for Owen and Grace? The tension that Doyle builds between them morphs into a nourishing friendship rather than a destructive lust.

Because Doyle refused to write a book where things only go from bad to worse, I kept expecting the novel to lapse into sentimentality. But for the most part it didn’t. Sentimentality is false: an attempt to see goodness where it is not and a refusal to see evil where it is. In Mink River, evil is not hidden or ignored. Instead, it is revealed in a unique way: evil exists, but it is actively marginalized by the form of the novel. Mink River is a tapestry of storylines narrated from high above. This high and broad vantage point means that evil, while present, never occupies center stage for long.

But is a reality where evil is marginalized reflective of Reality, as such? Is Doyle revealing the truth, or distorting it? Is this how people experience good and evil, and does it conform to Christian revelation about good and evil?

Yes and no. No, many people do not experience evil as only a marginal force. Instead it is an ever-present threat, a danger, a bully. There are times in life where evil feels like the main character. But while Mink River does not frame reality this way, it affirms this is how life sometimes feels. Grace is haunted by her mother’s abandonment and her father’s death. No Horses is pummeled by the “black snow” of depression. Kristi is raped by her father—a manifestation of evil if there ever was one. These characters are preoccupied with the broken parts of the human experience. Doyle has not created a world where evil feels marginal to the characters. Instead he has created a vantage point from which the reader can see evil, and yet see it as something that is secondary to a more prominent goodness.

Doyle portrays the world as a place where goodness is writ large and evil is writ small. However life might feel to a particular person at a particular moment, the universe is a place of overwhelming stability and order. There are hurricanes and accidents and disasters, true, but these tragedies play out amidst a tapestry that is tightly and expertly woven. Bad things happen, and yet the world spins and humanity continues. Things fall apart, and yet the center still holds.

Mink River is structured to draw our eye up, down, in, and around all at the same time. Each of the storylines is built around a complex and engaging character—each storyline could have easily constituted a novel of its own. But Doyle chose not to tell the stories of lone individuals and their personal confrontations with evil. Instead he chose to weave a tapestry in which the coherence and beauty of the form is paramount to any snags that may be present in the individual threads. Even the snags are ultimately woven into the final work. In Mink River, brokenness is not reversed. Instead it is redeemed and reincorporated into the whole.

Reading Mink River stretched my imagination. I feel more at home in the worlds of Flannery O’Connor or Toni Morrison where grace is violent and love is tinged with horror. Both O’Connor and Morrison provide an excellent challenge to the human proclivity to sentimentalize. But Doyle provides an equally important check on the human tendency toward despair and premature judgment.

By the end of Mink River, I felt like Jonah staring out over Nineveh. I was uneasy with the tranquility I saw, I wanted something to hurry up and get destroyed. But like God in the last chapter of Jonah, Doyle chose to stay his hand. The latter half of the novel is scattered with moments that prime us to expect death, and yet Doyle chooses to give his characters life instead. To read Mink River is to be taunted by the assertion “God is good, all the time.” Brian Doyle really believes that.