Towns Without Rivers - Hardcover

Parker, Michael

3.64

73 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0380978601 ISBN 13: 9780380978601

Publisher: William Morrow, 2001

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In his stirring second novel, Michael Parker paints a vivid portrait of a young woman determined to escape her past. Revisiting Trent -- the Southern town so poignantly rendered in his acclaimed first novel, Hello Down There -- Parker turns his attention to Reka Speight, a character whose strength of spirit brings her as passionately to life as any female character in contemporary literary fiction.

Reka Speight is determined to discover a wider world than the rural backwater that has an almost malevolent grip on her. Armed with nothing but her sharp instincts and a hard-won education she earned while behind bars, Reka lies her way into a job that takes her thousands of miles west.

But it also takes her away from the one person she cares about, her younger brother Randall. Their special bond has always set them apart from the rest of the Speight clan; Reka knows she can't be happy until Randall has escaped their family's legacy of poverty, narrow-mindedness, and alcoholism. Reka hasn't seen Randall since she was released from jail, and she must entrust her father with a letter explaining her departure -- and how Randall can find her -- in the hopes that he will soon follow.

So begins a journey that takes Reka from North Carolina to Montana to Seattle; from steamy Trent to climates colder than she's ever imagined; from prison bars to the World's Fair; and from her dead lover's bedside into the arms of a man she can't forget, no matter how hard she tries. Through it all, Randall is always on her mind. Although returning to Trent means risking everything she has achieved to escape, Reka realizes she and her brother are bound together by a force stronger than will. What she can't know is that Randall's own wanderings have taken him into even darker territories, and that his quest to find the sister he has always emulated may prove more difficult than he expects...now that the only strength he has to rely on is his own.

In a striking tale of one iron-willed woman's determination to decide her own fate, Towns Without Rivers reveals the consequences of taking your life into your own hands and the astonishing resiliency of the human spirit. Probing one of the great conflicts of literature, Michael Parker's triumphant novel asks us whether the absence of love really must be the price of survival.

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About the Author:

Michael Parker is the author of the novel Hello Down There a New York Times Notable Book and the short story collection The Geographical Cure, winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize. Parker teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

From Publishers Weekly:

The intertwined wanderings of 25-year-old Eureka Speight, recently released from wrongful imprisonment for her lover's death and anxious to start anew, and her younger brother, Randall, sensitive and complex but unable to weather the harshness of existence, might seem contrived and flat in most novels. In Parker's third, however, they mature into an absorbing narrative that perceptively explores twin searches for identity. After her release from prison, Reka tries to escape her white trash background in Trent, N.C. (the setting of Parker's well-reviewed first novel, Hello, Down There) by taking a job as a door-to-door textbook salesperson in the Midwest, but the job fizzles and she drifts across early 1960s America, ending up in Seattle. Randall leaves a construction job in Norfolk, Va., to search for his lost sister, heading westward after a series of sexual flings in Chicago. The siblings reunite only when they return home to Trent, but they find that a true reunion is impossible because in the course of their travels they have grown apart. Although the two protagonists' confusion and lack of direction becomes vexing at times, their movement across the country frequently resembles certain choreographed dances, beautiful to watch but inscrutable. Parker's lucid yet lyrical style is at its best when his sentences unfurl gracefully. At times, he creates drama from minimal ingredients, as minor spats blossom into rifts. As this novel winds to a melancholy, soulful end, its numerous voyages reveal themselves to be travels toward the same lonely physical and spiritual place. This is an introspective work that should awaken readers' imaginations and their awareness of their humanity. Agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, Ellen Levine Agency. (June)Forecast: Booksellers who alerted readers to Parker's earlier novels will beat the drums for this one. While the Southern setting is beautifully conveyed, the book transcends its regional base and has universal appeal.

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