Bonnie Jo Campbell and Once Upon a River and The Waters
I had never heard of Bonnie Jo Campbell until I read a review of her latest novel, The Waters that came out earlier this year. Reading the review and learning that her earlier novel Once Upon a River (2016) had been widely reviewed and appreciated, I ordered both books and have since read them with enthusiasm. Campbell was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1962; she grew up in a rural community outside the city. Of her early years, she has said, “I was a child left to my own devices . . . and I found plenty of joy, mystery, and trouble.” After graduating from high school in Michigan, Campbell earned a B.A. in philosophy from the Universe of Chicago and two degrees from Western Michigan University: an M.A. in mathematics and an M.F.A. in creative writing.
After a life of considerable adventure and travel, she returned to Kalamzaoo where she lives today with her husband, Christopher Magson. Since 1999, she has published three collections of short stories and three novels. She also writes poetry. Her writing has won several awards; her collection of short stories, American Salvage, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2009.
Campbell’s Once Upon a River (2016) follows a tradition of river tales like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As in Mark Twain’s novel, Campbell’s work features a young seeker, looking to escape troubles left behind. The huge difference is that Campbell’s protagonist is a young woman, Margaret Louise Crane, fifteen years old as the novel begins. Margo, as she is mostly known in the novel, clearly transcends patriarchal parameters for female behavior. She does not think of herself as female, although beautiful and certainly appealing to the men around her. Margo sees herself as a human being, searching for who she is in the natural environment that she loves– almost beyond reason.
Campbell set Once Upon a River in a rural area of Northern Michigan along the fictional Stark River. The time is 1979, but the characters still live close to the river, hunting, fishing, and fighting against both themselves and encroaching industrialism. Campbell is particularly adept at making this environment come alive to readers unfamiliar with the area.
A lonely, mainly silent, only child, Margo is victimized as a young girl when her mother, Luanne, deserts her family; afterward, she denies all connection with Margo. From early childhood, Margo’s main companion has been her grandfather, a river man who teaches her to hunt and fish. When he dies, he leaves her his boat. From the age of about twelve, then, Margo is pretty much on her own. Disinterested in formal education, she owns one book, a biography of Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter whom she idolizes. A kind of “throwback,” Margo soon becomes a sharpshooter herself.
When the girl is fifteen, her blood uncle rapes her; her father, seeking revenge, gets himself murdered. Margo then takes to the river both to search for her mother and to realize her identity as a child of the natural world. Treating her sexuality as clearly natural and normal, Margo becomes involved with three unworthy men. She also finds her mother, only to be rejected again. Ultimately, Margo meets an elderly surrogate father who helps her understand that she needs human warmth and love along with the natural world.
Campbell offers no such qualified happy ending in her recent novel, The Waters, a work much different from Once Upon as River. Though set in the contemporary world in the same rural Michigan area, The Waters seems remote in time with mythical qualities and hints of the “magic realism” that has become popular in some fiction since the late 1960s. (The term identifies the use of magical elements in otherwise realistic fiction.)
In The Waters, these elements evolve from the mysterious island setting of the novel and the folk medical treatments offered by the eccentric woman who lives there. Though written in the third person, the story generally evolves through the perspective of eleven-year-old, Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, brilliant in math but naïve to the intricate mysteries of her family. She is being raised by her grandmother, Hermione “Herself” Zook, the practitioner of folk medicine. Hermione is a self-proclaimed outsider to the village of Whiteheart, near her island, but the local people depend on her folk concoctions. Long estranged from her husband, Wild Bill Zook, Herself is ostensibly the mother of three daughters, Primrose, currently a lawyer in San Diego, Maryanne “Molly” a nurse who lives off the island, and Rose Thorn, Dorothy’s mother, a free spirit, madly in love with a local farmer, Titus Clay. The whimsical Rose Thorn vacillates between California and The Waters.
Campbell’s novel mainly covers the months of Rose Thorn’s final return to The Waters, her continued romance with Titus Clay, Dorothy’s struggles to understand that relationship and the peculiar family connections among Hermione and her daughters. A group of local men, friends of Titus and worshipers of Rose Thorn, serve both as a sort of rural chorus in the novel and the carrier of the theme of community. Animals are also important at The Waters: two donkeys save Dorothy’s infant life when she is only able to drink their milk; a dog serves as Dorothy’s only “sibling;” and, a fierce M’sauga rattlesnake emerges as her evil twin. Melodramatic action occurs late in the novel with only partly satisfying results, but, overall, Campbell herself has addressed the continuing uncertainty of human existence in this work. In an interview, she has said, “The goal in this novel of community is to find a way we can all coexist. And I didn’t want that to be boring—I wanted coexisting to be kind of exciting.”
