Deliverance (1970)

Poet and novelist James Dickey’s first novel was much better than I expected—and from its reputation I expected it to be pretty good. It is first and foremost a great story of outdoor adventure. It is full of description, but its thriller-like plot keeps it clipping along. The first-person narrator Ed Gentry is a middle-aged guy who runs a small ad agency in Atlanta with a partner. His best friend is Lewis, a back-to-nature guy in the survivalist mode. Lewis develops skills like bow-and-arrow hunting. It is his idea to take a weekend canoe trip with Ed and two others down an isolated stretch of river thick with rapids, falls, and danger. One of Dickey’s themes—which seems positively prescient now—is the contrast between urban and rural lives and lifestyles. Both are represented here and neither comes off well. The city dudes are shallow users, crass usurpers of culture and intruders in the wilderness, with their slick fast-talking ways. But the backwoods characters are worse, ignorant, suspicious, and prone to brutality of a notably bizarre type that plays to big-city judgments. You know what I’m talking about, maybe like me exposed to this story originally in the film version by director John Boorman (from Dickey’s screenplay)—the rape of one of the city dudes by a backwoodsman. He’s perfectly anonymous, a monster out of our interbreeding fantasies of them, only perhaps based in part on reality. It’s pretty strong stuff in the movie—I basically watched the rest of it in a semi-traumatized daze. It’s not the punch in the face in the book that it was in the movie, but I’m not sure whether that’s because it’s handled differently or because I was braced for it. Again, what impresses me most about this novel is the way it moves through nature and uses it. Scenes in the gorge of the river are insanely vivid. It may be sort of corny to say you feel like you are there, but you feel like you are there. Deliverance feels like a missing link between Faulkner’s “The Bear” and Cormac McCarthy. It’s full of the blood and gore that appeals to contemporary sensibilities but it’s all in the service of these various meditations on so-called civilized humanity. I should note women are here barely at all, which is good considering they get a kind of distasteful, leering Playboy treatment when they are. Like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, Deliverance is best when it’s on the river.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.