The Names of Rivers: A Novel - Softcover

With honesty and depth, Daniel Buckman creates a memorable account of trauma and loss with The Names of Rivers. Buckman's novel focuses on the Konicks, a broken family in a poor Illinois town whose nature and experience seem to lead them hopelessly toward misfortune. Patriarch Bruno Konick, an expert in obsolete crafts, lives a meager, largely isolated life, haunted by the horrors he witnessed as a soldier during World War II. His emotional distance and anger alienated him from his sons, who nonetheless followed him into military service and returned from the Vietnam War with similar psychological damage. Elder son Bruce, a violent alcoholic with a gruesome facial scar, harasses the townspeople and steals from his father. Memories of wartime atrocities, a long-standing heroin addiction, Bruce's childhood sexual assaults, and his father's neglect have left younger son Len a weakened shell of a man. Bruce's abandoned son, Luke, possesses an intelligence that offers him a possible escape from this familial cycle, but it's at odds with the aimlessness and resentment he inherited from his father and the limited options around him.

Though troubling in its subject matter, Buckman's perceptive yet restrained characterizations offer The Names of Rivers resonance and poignancy. Brutally precise yet compassionate descriptions help convey the helplessness and regret of this gallery of displaced, lonely characters, lending the book's hard lessons a sense of disquieting accuracy. A persistently sad novel, The Names of Rivers rewards readers with the kind of wisdom gained from such a painful journey. --Ross Doll

From a variety of perspectives, Buckman examines the complex relationships between fathers and sons, between men and history, weaving a cohesive novel rich in life's substance. Where his prose echoes Hemingway's extraordinary actuality, a constant reminder of the flesh's terrible importance in human relations, his vision heeds Faulkner's call for basic humanity amidst the pitiless and endless violence of twentieth-century history. A story of love and pain, of sin and forgiveness, NAMES OF RIVERS enacts a drama rich in biblical tradition and sheer moral weight by asking the oldest of all questions: am I my brother's keeper?