Happy birthday, Deliverance

Dickey had a cameo role in the movie

James Dickey's lone novel, Deliverance, turned 40 this year, and New York Times book critic Dwight Garner remembers with insight for writers today.

“Deliverance” is the kind of novel few serious writers attempt any longer, a book about wilderness and survival whose DNA contains shards of both “Heart of Darkness” and “Huckleberry Finn.” It tells the story of four mild, middle-class men from suburban Atlanta who embark on a canoe trip, snaking down a remote Georgia river that will soon disappear beneath a dam. In the woods they find boiling rapids and two sinister mountain men. Before the novel is over, the carnage is nearly complete: three men have been crudely buried, one has been raped, and the survivors have had the bark peeled from their modern sensibilities.

These days our culture takes these kinds of narratives, about masculine midlife longing and regret, and de-fangs them, turning them into films like “Wild Hogs,” the benign John Travolta motorcycle trip movie. The novelists who take us into the woods and wilds, Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane invaluably among them, bring along slapstick and irony as critical mosquito repellent. (Was it Robert Bly, in his “Iron John” phase, who made it impossible for American men to walk purposefully into a forest without feeling as if drums and self-awareness needed to be involved?)

Dickey wrote about men, neither dudes nor (although they were fathers) dads. The men in “Deliverance” meet real monsters and recognize their ability to become, in Dickey’s phrase, countermonsters. 

“Deliverance," Garner concludes, "has its narrative eddies, and moments where its backwoods mysticism is ripe. But Dickey’s moral awareness infuses this book with grainy life; guilt and blame are not easily assigned. The book presents a quagmire none of its characters escape. In 2010, it’s lonely work looking for its serious successors."