To begin, as I write this review, I have not seen the famous 1972 blockbuster Deliverance, starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox. Everyone (at least in the US) is aware of two famous scenes: the banjo kid and the “squeal like a pig” scene. My understanding is that the movie is so memorable because the rape happens to a man. In the 1970s, directors were totally fine with rape happening to women (e.g. The Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, and Straw Dogs). Thus, Deliverance has a long memory in American cinema.

However, the bestselling 1970 novel on which the film was based was written by James Dickey, a winner of the National Book Award for poetry, WWII veteran, and English professor. Dickey’s acumen in poetry is obvious in the sentences in Deliverance. The deep woods of Georgia come to life off the pages, each movement and emotion is worth exploring to its very end, though this is an issues for some readers who felt Dickey wrote pages and pages of a man climbing a rock wall or taking aim at a deer with a bow. In general, the writing is lush.

The story is narrated by Ed several years after the events of the novel. He’s a graphic artist a bit bored by the mundanity of regular life. Just in time, his best friend, Lewis, asks Ed and two other guys to come canoeing for the weekend. Ed is hesitant, aware that he has zero wilderness skills, but Lewis, who believes himself a survivalist, seems so confident. The morning before the four head out, Ed realizes, “I couldn’t have cared less about anything or anybody. If going up in the woods with Lewis does something about that feeling, I’m for it.” Ed’s wife asks if his negative feelings about normalcy are her fault. Ed thinks, “Tt partly was, just as it’s any woman’s fault who represents normalcy.” Though the wife knows she represents routine and comfort, and Ed agrees, Dickey never disparages women in a toxic way. Even an early scene at the ad agency Ed co-owns, where a young woman is photographed mostly naked for an advertisement, Dickey avoids objectifying her, acknowledging that the photographs are a sort of non-consenting consent.

The other two men to join the canoe trip are Bobby, described as weak and flabby, and Drew, a musician. Though Lewis is a professed outdoorsman and fitness buff, the other three are average office workers. The one exception is that Lewis got Ed into bow hunting a few years back, and Ed isn’t bad at it. He’s brought his bow and four arrows along with him, imagining himself killing an animal so they can feast on meat along the river. That he pictures eating a deer on a two night, three day trip tells me lots about his ignorance, which Dickey cleverly adds without telling you to think that. The readers has to know something about killing, cleaning, and gutting animals to make the connection.

To get started, the four hire two a few men, backwoods hillbillies (made obvious by their setting, clothes, and words) to drop the four men off with two canoes at one part of the river and then leave their cars where they plan to exit the river. Here, Dickey already makes you recoil, thinking what harm could come to four city idiots at the hands of three local rednecks. We’re in the middle of no where — and readers can feel it. Anything could happen to Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew, be it drowning, snake bite, breaking a limb and being stranded in the wilderness, or death by locals. Even getting to where they launch the canoes is terrifying:

All at once the road fell away and slid down a kind of bank. I didn’t see how it would be possible to get back up. “Hold on,” Lewis said, and tipped the car over forward. Rhododendron and laurel bushes closed in on us with a soft limber rush. A branch of something jumped in the window and stayed, laying across my chest.

They aren’t even on a road! The entirety of the novel is set on or along this uncharted, ill-advised river. Later, we learn parts of the river has names the locals know, and early on, they all ask Lewis, “You’re going to do what??” giving readers a clear indication that this boys’ trip meant to make them feel alive again is stupid.

From beginning to end, I was engrossed in Ed’s narrative, his longing to be like the outdoorsy Lewis, his disgust at the weak Bobby, his admiration of Drew’s musical talent — Drew even brings a guitar along for the trip. As the river becomes more dangerous and the locals threaten their lives, Ed morphs from sidekick to hesitant leader, at times leading everyone to safety while in the back of his head considering running home. As for that famous rape scene from the movie, well, it does happen in the novel, too. I will say that the scene is short and includes few descriptions. You know what’s happening, but it’s mostly off the page.

Although Deliverance is a men’s story — about men and for men — the unifying theme of survival is universally appealing, asking readers what can you do when you insert yourself into nature, thinking you can take it on and it laughs in your face. At least Ed was smart enough to know it, but too dumb to follow his intelligence: “The sickening memory of where I was took hold of me from the inside of the heart.”

books of winter ⛄🎄❄️

• Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
• Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer (DNF)
• This is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan
• Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer
• Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho
• Suggs Black Backtracks by Martha Ann Spencer (DNF)
• Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval (DNF)
• The Lost Girls by Allison Brennan (#11)
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• Touched by Kim Kelly (DNF)
• The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead by Chanelle Benz (DNF)
• The Road to Helltown by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs series #9) (special review in April)
• How to Save a Misfit by Ellen Cassidy
• After Life by Andrew Neiderman
• Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn
• Jaws by Peter Benchley
• The New York trilogy by Paul Auster
• All of Me by Venise Berry
• At Wit’s End by Erma Bombeck
• Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
• Awakened by Laura Elliott