On the River Styx : And Other Stories

Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard.

This stunning collection of short stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most acclaimed literary voices of our time.

Sadie --
The fifth day --
The centerpiece --
Late in the season --
Travelin man --
The wolves of Aguila --
Horse latitudes --
Midnight turning gray --
On the River Styx --
Lumumba lives

In these powerful stories, explorer-novelist Matthiessen ( Far Tortuga ; The Snow Leopard ) creates people trapped in set behavior patterns that no longer make sense, like the burned-out CIA agent in "Lumumba Lives" who returns to his childhood house in upstate New York and takes up duck shooting, or the contract hunter in "The Wolves of Aguila," a Navajo who realizes that with each random kill he is destroying the wild terrain that sustains him. Actions have unforeseen consequences in a number of these 10 tales: a young female attendant's campaign to secure an inmate's release from a mental hospital only makes things worse for the shrapnel-deranged war vet; a white, liberal couple on vacation in a Florida fishing town trigger a racial ruckus when the husband befriends a black boatman. Matthiessen's empathy for lost adventurers, uprooted citizens of the world, shines through in the exotic, amusing "Horse Latitudes," which pits an uppity Baptist missionary against a seasick Lebanese merchant on a British freighter bound for Haiti. In limpid, lyrical prose, these dazzling stories objectively explore the lack of communication between husbands and wives, between races and cultures.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Although he has written and published fiction, Matthiessen is better known as a writer of such nonfiction as The Snow Leopard ( LJ 7/78). If these stories are any indication, he should focus on nonfiction in the future. Most of the stories are from the early stages in his writing career--only two were written within the last 25 years--and often they read like the exercises of an unpolished writer trying to work on the craft of fiction. Thus, in one he may experiment with a woman's perspective, in another with a black man's. Little of this experimentation is successful. Libraries, other than those with comprehensive collections, need not spend money on this.
- John Budd, Graduate Lib. Sch., Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.