Michael Farris Smith, RIVERS

Michael Farris Smith's competent but unexciting first novel falls into the trap of a lot of work that hybridizes "literary" and "genre" from the literary side of the divide: its thematic ambitions prevent a sufficiently complicated plot, and the demands of the narrative undermine the thematic intent. The premise is sound: a dystopian world where the storms that ravage the American southeast on a yearly basis become so powerful and so continuous that the government gives up, draws a Line beyond which those who stay will be on their own. Those who stay are in constant danger, from the weather and from roving bands of amoral treasure hunters seeking the millions in cash that casinos allegedly buried before the evacuation. In the midst of this chaos the protagonist, Cohen, mourns the death of his pregnant wife, doing the minimum to keep himself alive and wallowing in his grief. But when a chance encounter leaves him with no choice but to die or take extraordinary steps to live, he begins a journey that may lead him back to happiness... if he survives.

There's a lot to admire about Rivers. Smith's prose captures the melancholy and the terror of endless rain and wind, a fine metaphor for depressive grief. Long sentences uninterrupted by commas create narrative momentum and a sense of the simple desperation of life below the Line. The pace is sharp enough that the unfocused, not-especially-original plot only becomes an issue in hindsight. But when one looks back, one realizes that there's not much new about the bleak view of humanity on offer here, and the language isn't powerful enough to give familiar themes fresh intensity. It doesn't help that Cohen's grief, while well-evoked in individual passages, becomes monotonous in the long term, as unleavened portrayals of dysfunction so often do. And it's difficult to reconcile Cohen's grief with the bursts of dramatic activity that life in a dystopian milieu demand: "I can't go on, oh wait, it's time for an action scene." You can gloss this in terms of survival instincts, but the underlying issue is that Cohen isn't a rounded enough character for his behavior to stand up to scrutiny.

Other characters are even more broadly sketched, and awkwardly integrated into a novel that's mostly about Cohen. Several of them disappear abruptly three-quarters of the way through, leaving one to wonder what they were doing in the story at all. And then the ending increases the question to "What was the point of any of that?" I suppose it's reasonable in terms of tone, the struggle between despair and hope that the novel has dramatized, but it's not an intellectually or emotionally satisfying resolution, and it solidifies the sense that this material would have been better served by the novella form. At novel length it fall just short of doing any one thing well enough to make for a real success.