One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike by Brian Doyle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Margaret Renkl’s glowing revie in the New York Times turned me towards this. I’m always on the lookout for another Helen MacDonald, Henry Beston, Loren Eiseley, or Aldo Leopold. At his very best, Doyle nips at their heels with deft and vivid imagery, precise observations, sometimes gorgeous language, and emotional power. He’s very good on birds: a coop-raiding gyrfalcon is described rising “easily into the fraught and holy air” with a chicken dangling from its “daggered fist,” then glaring back at the henhouse owner “with the clear and unarguable message, I am taking this chicken and you are not going to be a fool and mess with me.” An owl “launch[es] at dusk, like a burly gray dream against the last light.” There are herons and hummingbirds and hawks besides. He is a devoted and devout father: he cradles his groggy toddler son after the boy’s major heart surgery, clicking numbly through TV channels until the child suddenly rouses, takes the remote, and clicks it back to watch “the massive grace and power and patience of” tigers, and laughs while his father weeps and prays. Lovely, poignant, and sometimes funny – his sister’s assessment of the minds of the guinea hens she supervises at her convent made me laugh out loud… birds again.
He can also be arrogant and not as funny as he thinks he is (“Brian Doyle Interviews Brian Doyle”); he likes to refer to cats at the spawn of Satan. The verbiage is lush, the sentences are long. One essay – and not a particularly good one, about pants – begins with a 379-word sentence, which he is quite proud of. He has cultivated a particular style of dense, straggling passages, packed with alliteration, and rattling chains of nouns, adjectives, clauses, and semi-colons. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s precious and I picture him clacking down on the final period and chuckling to himself: “Ha! There! That’s a good one!”
All told, as collections often are, this can be uneven: some pieces brought smiles or a lump to my throat; others I skipped after the first sentence. Doyle is a wonderfully observing, thoughtful writer dedicated to this craft, his family, the natural and spiritual worlds. He wonders if a dead mole would miss the pressure of the soil against its body, and decides to bury it rather than tossing it over the fence. He ponders the rough, jokey, fierce love of brothers; the gentle intelligence and kindness of his father. He raves at human violence and why we cannot seem to evolve beyond it, even while hoping we might someday do so. He reminds us of the gift we have in the world, and how we shouldn’t miss a detail. He’s right about that.
View all my reviews