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Brian Kiteley

The River Gods Kindle Edition

by Brian Kiteley (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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The River Gods is a novel in fragments, a mix of fact and fiction, in which various inhabitants of the area around what is now Northampton, Massachusetts, from the eleventh century through the 1990s, speak of their lives and of the community, a place haunted by the pervasive melancholy of extinguished desire.

Each of the voices--including a character named Brian Kiteley and his family, the original Native American inhabitants, the actor Richard Burton, Sojourner Truth, Richard Nixon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jonathan Edwards, and many nameless others--ruminate on a past that is startlingly present and tangible. The main character, though, is the world of Northampton, irrevocably woven into the fabric of Western history, yet still grounded by the everyday concerns of health, money, food, love, and family. It is a novel of voices, the living and the dead, that illuminate the passage of time.

Print length

176 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Fiction Collective 2
Publication date

January 28, 2011
File size

401 KB
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Brian Kiteley
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Editorial Reviews

Review

River Gods such as Israel Williams, 70 years old in March of 1779, alternate chapters with members of novelist Kiteley's own family: his grandfather, his parents, his gay brother, and various other inhabitants of Northampton. They speak in monologues, opening their minds and hearts to the reader as might, say, spirits at a seance, with the novelist as the inspired spiritualist. The result is an intense and beautiful collage of speeches in time about events in this one place from the familiar in every day to the divine. A 16-year-old Christian boy in the spring of 1738 says, Molly and I do not deceive out of fear of discovery, or because it pleases us to, because we do no one harm, and because we enjoy accumulating venal sins. Jump forward to 1989, and the novelist himself chants the names of Northampton Streets: First Square, Florence, Young Rainbow, Old Rainbow, Locust, Myrtle, Maple, Elm, Audubon, Evergreen. By this method, Northampton, Massachusetts, in this unlikely and memorable tribute to one writer's hometown, becomes everyone's location. The River Gods conjures up a local habitation by means of aesthetic magic. It's a meditation, a celebration, an investigation and an elegy. --Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered (NPR)

The River Gods is a subtle portrait of the way the ripples in the human pond complicate one another. It tenderly examines the filaments that connect individual to family and family to town and town to nation and nation to world, and shows how rupture, love, death, and memory shiver their way up and down these filaments to create a delicate whole. A beautifully rendered investigation of joy and loss, and of the way in which longing and desire and regret can lap over the divide between life and death. --Brian Evenson

The River Gods is a soft-spoken novel, filled with history and nuance and contemplative space. Told as a series of first-person accounts by historical characters in or around the town of Northampton, MA, the book effectively pulls about 400 years of that town's history into a collective narrative portrait. The form is spatial rather than linear. Kiteley moves forward and back through time, allowing each speaker his or her specific contemporaneity, so that the town's identity emerges not as a palimpsest--its present-day streets and houses and inhabitants "written over" its deep historical past--but rather as a kind of historical simultaneity: these people may have lived at different points in history, but they are all speaking right now in this book. These were real people, often famous ones (Jonathan Edwards, Sojourner Truth, William Carlos Williams), yet here their primary contribution to the identity of Northampton is not their historical relevance, but rather their assumptions, quirks, flaws, joys, walks, deaths, and all the other elements that composed their experiences of the world. The past comes to us with the same precision as the present, in the particular qualities of the people who lived here over time. --Martin Riker, The Review of Contemporary Fiction --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Brian Kiteley is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver, and the author of Still Life With Insects, I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing, The 3 A.M. Epiphany, and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00571F1WY
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fiction Collective 2; First edition (January 28, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 28, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 401 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 176 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #1,644,685 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #10,550 in U.S. Historical Fiction
- #146,479 in Historical Fiction (Books)
- #200,819 in American Literature (Books)

Customer Reviews:
12 ratings

About the author

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Brian Kiteley

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Brian Kiteley's third novel The River Gods was published by FC2 and is available as both e-book and paperback. He has also published two novels, Still Life With Insects and I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing, and two collections of fiction exercises, The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough. He is at work on two linked novels set in Crete in 1988, about love, sun, sex, and the CIA, with cameos by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Brian Kiteley teaches at the University of Denver in the Creative Writing PhD program. His home page is:

https://www.briankiteley.com/

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Edward Gerrish Mair

Wester Massacusettd

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2019

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Good history of Northampton, MA and Connecticut River Valley.

One person found this helpful

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A. Bohn

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2014

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Beautiful writing. fascinating story. Haven't yet finished it, but I do enjoy Brian Kiteley.

One person found this helpful

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mimi

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2015

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Excellent writing

One person found this helpful

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Roger Brunyate

Northampton Voices

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2013

It looks almost like a book of poetry, produced with care by a small press, with a lovely drawing of a river scene framing an old map on the cover. Open it, and you will find not verse but prose, separate short passages of two or three pages each, almost like poetry. All are headed with a date, ranging from 1062 to 1995, and the name and age of the speaker. The names include those of the author and other members of his family, plus a great variety of others, some invented, some famous, such as Jonathan Edwards, Sojourner Truth, Calvin Coolidge, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Carlos Williams, Richard Nixon, Sylvia Plath, Ben Bradlee, and Mike Nichols, the director of the movie of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, filmed in part at Smith College in 1965. For all the voices have some connection with the town of Northampton in Western Massachusetts, the Connecticut River that flows through it, or the college that is one of its jewels.

Kiteley calls this a novel, though there is no obvious order linking the stories, and no plot -- a fact the author acknowledges in the closing sentence: "Life is not simply story, but chemistry, physics, and behavior, layered over biology in a beautiful synergy." And history. And an accumulation of fact and feeling over the course of centuries. These fragments hang together in mysterious ways; it is a book you don't want to put down, where each little vignette adds a gleaming nugget to a composite history, not just of Northampton, but of America, of living.

About a third of the 66 short sections involve a member of the Kiteley family. "In many ways these are the most fictionalized narratives in the book," the author writes, "although the details that underpin these characters are accurate." Two of Kiteley's inspirations, I would guess, are the death from AIDS of his brilliant elder brother Geoffrey, and his grandfather's final years. At 83, he has the old man say something that might stand for the theme of the book: "He is telling me the stories from my past, which he does well now, although he has difficulty keeping straight the fictions he is writing and the facts he has gleaned from my own probably inaccurate stories." But fact or fiction, they all have the resonance of truth.

The other episodes link with the Kiteley stories and with each other, always in subtle ways. We have Jonathan Edwards' strict policy on church membership followed a little later by a courageous speech by Geoffrey Kiteley at 13 declaring why he does NOT wish to join the church. Edwards' talk of "hewing, planing, and squaring away a child's sins" ironically follows a lovely pastoral interlude of two young lovers of his time who take carnal knowledge of one another then float to their deaths on the river. Much as in Thornton Wilder's play OUR TOWN, which is surely an inspiration, death here is a fact of life, and since the characters all narrate their own deaths (whether in the Connecticut river or a battlefield in the Egyptian desert), they emerge as transcendence rather than cessation. A fact that is made gloriously clear in the final snapshot, an obvious echo of the teenage lovers of 1738, but in this case the young couple's love-making leads to the creation of life.

This is a beautiful, elegiac, poetic, and transformative book. Buy it.

8 people found this helpful

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Amy Henry

Unique and subtle

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2010

Back in 2002, I was in New Orleans for the Super Bowl. We did all the usual touristy things, but I was especially fascinated with Jackson Square in the French Quarter. I spent an afternoon on a bench there, people watching and just absorbing the history of the place. So many events have taken place in that location that I felt like all the other tourists should be paying more attention. It seems like a part of history was still alive even if few people were noticing it. And it was the first place I thought of when Katrina slammed the region: history continuing on, in that uniquely relevant place.

That memory was triggered for me when I read Brian Kiteley's novel, The River Gods. This book takes place in Northampton, Massachusetts, and creates a fictional history of events that occurred over several hundred years in that one location. The rambling river that divides the town also intersects the stories, then and now. The focus of the story is the characters: wildly diverse yet all living within that same region. They range from Puritan settlers to Native Americans, from famous celebrities to an ordinary family called the Kiteleys. The stories are short, and reveal just a snippet of a moment in time. It isn't until later that the impact of the individual stories reveal the comprehensive whole of Northampton history.

In one instance, we are introduced to Abigail Slaughter, one of the Puritan settlers who left England to protect their religious freedoms. She describes the region in 1680: "The land was from the beginning a savage antagonist. We pursued an immediate knowledge of the land to make it ours, but the complexity of this environment often killed or maddened us." That same area, slightly tamed over the passage of a few hundred years, is still mysterious, when, in 1826 Arius Fuller describes an unsolved murder in the same region. Even later, in 1965, a young Brian Kiteley is spying on his grandfather and brother along a verdant river, wondering how he can ever measure up against his agreeable brother.

The idea that one physical place can hold years of history is nothing new. This is why travelers visit the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. It isn't just the location but the mystery of the unseen people that have lived and breathed at those sites. This is why Kiteley's book is so intriguing. Imagining the heartache, the conflicts, and the joys of different people set against the same backdrop gives it depth, and makes each story, possibly insignificant on its own, have a keener meaning. Because each story is very short, the pace is very quick. Stopping to note the dates on each entry is essential to getting the big picture of how all these stories combine in Northampton. And since they aren't told chronologically, but rather jump back and forth in time, there's a dynamic sense of unity between each character and their place in Northhampton's stream of time.

9 people found this helpful

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Sarah S.

Completely beautiful, completely original

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2009

If the U.S. designated authors as National Treasures, Brian Kiteley would be a national treasure. Every page of The River Gods is such pure happiness: beautiful, still, compelling, deep.

When you read this novel -- with its short, immaculate, illuminating chapters -- you acquire the sense of perspective on human life that a particularly wry and insightful god might have. The tracing of webs between characters very satisfyingly replaces a more ordinary narrative with something that's not quite like what any other writer in the world does.

Can you tell I'm recommending this book? I am, most definitely.

15 people found this helpful

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J. Lurie

Beautiful & Elegant

Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2009

Dude can write. A beautiful creation of first person narrations offering glimpses into the history of a New England town. Each glimpse is like a scent triggering a long-dormant memory. Together, those memories offer a fragmented picture of a majestic life. Once the voices begin to reoccur and the glimpses begin to weave into one another, you can't put it down.

7 people found this helpful

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J. Coan

The River Gods -- a gem!

Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2010

I loved this book on many levels. Having grown up in Northampton, Massachusetts at the same time as Mr. Kiteley, I treasure how accurately he captures the feel of the community during those years. In many ways I felt that I was reading the story of my own youth. But one need not be from Northampton, or even know of Northampton, to be swept away with the panorama that Mr. Kiteley evokes. He has created a masterpiece with his intricate weaving together of many lives through many periods of time but within one location. A compelling story that is a pleasure to read and savor again and again.

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