Off-beat novel about a bunch of losers and floaters by a riverscape.
The lives of congenial American fly-fisherman Billy and his younger sister Alice meander alongside the Susquehanna River in this offbeat coming-of-age novel of death, madness, and fishing by debut author Karen Fielding. What starts out as a frolic of losers and drifters along the American riverscape flows into something more sinister when twelve-year-old Billy Sycamore encounters a stranger in the woods, while Alice is left to deal with the fall-out. In the spirit of Richard Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America" and idiosyncratic like a George Saunders story, "American Sycamore" is a funny and fractious narrative about growing up in a small town in northeast America, with not a lot to do, but a whole lot to worry about.
Excerpt
ABOUT BEFORE
I have yet to see a bear walk in the woods. I have not seen
anyone struck by lightning or drown in the river. But these
things happen. They always do and they always will and Billy
Sycamore, two years older, two foot taller, and too good a
fisherman to notice much, got a little funny. Sometimes people
ask if I have a brother. This is a perfectly normal question. I’m
just not sure how to reply.
The great cities of the world built themselves upon the
great rivers of the world. People need the rivers, not vice versa.
People forget that. Some rivers start from snows high up or
springs underground. Some crisscross each other; some roar
along steady and strong. Some disappear.
People used to think the Susquehanna River, like all great
rivers encircling the globe, magically flowed from the middle
of the earth. That’s what people thought when the world was
still flat.
Lately I have been thinking about my own beginnings
along the Susquehanna River with its hundreds of rivulets and
tributaries converging.
I am lonely for this river.
The home with black shutters and large-winged crows. The
red geraniums in summer and horse chestnuts in the fall. The
abandoned old house by the creek.
The fish in the woods that walked to the river.
The Indian who flew away like a bird.
MRS SPRAGUE
When the river rose and flooded our town the wind blew the
geography teacher’s roof off. She lived in a tin-clad house close
to the Susquehanna River. There were lightning rods jutting
from the roof in various angles and directions, much like the
hair that sprung out from Mrs Sprague’s head. In 1972 Mrs
Sprague wore cat-shaped eyeglasses and she hated the North
Vietnamese. She despised them in the same way a preacher
hates the Devil. On the other hand, she seemed to like
Richard Nixon and Germany was pretty high on her list too.
She made us learn the days of the week in German. She made
us count to twenty in German. Then she’d tell us the North
Vietnamese were going into South Vietnam to kill all those
poor people. She made it sound pretty dire, Mrs Sprague. Then
she’d have us write on a piece of paper if we were for the
North Vietnamese or the South Vietnamese. After a
manipulative speech like that, who in their right mind is going
to write down ‘North Vietnamese’ unless their parents made
their own peanut butter or grew pot in their backyard.
Nobody in our seventh-grade class had any more enlightened
parental types than we had – upper middle class drunks who
voted for Richard Nixon, twice.
I remember glancing up from my desk to see her unfold
each piece of paper and nod her head with the satisfaction of
a mongoose. And I remember when she asked if Billy
Sycamore was my brother. ‘Are you related?’
‘He’s my brother, I said.
‘Well that’s very odd,’ she said. ‘When I asked if you were
his sister he said: “Mrs Sprague, we aren’t related at all.”’
'Imagine white-water rafting with Richard Brautigan....the prose foams up like poetry. Wise, poignant, funny...and utterly original. -- Isabel Huggan
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