Look to the River: Volume 8

by William A. Owens

Book Overview

This is a story based on the author's childhood experience with a Texas chain gang working on roads near his home in Northeast Texas c. 1920. A terrible, but interesting, snapshot of Texas "justice." This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875650260
• ISBN13: 9780875650265
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Texas Christian University Press
• Length: 134 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A "Novel" Approach to History

Although the dust jacket reads "Look to the River: A Novel by William A. Owens," I'm hard pressed to call the book a novel. Its 185 pages are achieved largely through generous page margins and wide line spacing. It can be easily read in only one or two uninterrupted sittings. While a bit long to qualify as a short story, it is more of a novelette than a novel. Its characters are uniformly flat; that is, they are stereotypes that undergo no change or development in the course of the story. However, in this case, that is not necessarily an indictment of weakness in the book because the real-life people whom they represent are somewhat flat and stereotypical as well. By and large, these are not complex people: an uneducated, impoverished farm boy; an uneducated, almost impoverished farmer and his wife; and a red neck jailer and his trusties. Four other characters pretty much round out the entire population of the book: the ferry man, who plays a bit role; the tie hacker, whose presence is brief and thoroughly irrelevant to the story; Luster, the frightened black boy on the chain gang; and the peddler, who is at once the most complex and the least believable character. All of the characters but one act as we would expect them to, and their actions are driven by all-too-human conditions--ignorance, fear, poverty, avarice, and the bullying that comes when an inferior man is given control of others. We see played out in this story the lives of those who grovel in the dirt for a living in a backwater, undeveloped corner of northeast Texas in the early 1900s, a century ago as I write this. Roads are dirt and mud ruts; the relatively well-to-do traverse them by horseback or in mule-drawn wagons; most follow them by foot. Lives are generally spent eking out a bare-bones existence, and a drought or a voracious flock of blackbirds can destroy an entire year's livelihood along with the crop. The central character, Jed, has lost his parents and, along with them, the house in which he lived, and, having nothing to hold him, is determined to leave the river bottoms between Texas and Oklahoma, not because he knows what he seeks but because he knows that, whatever may exist in the unknown world elsewhere, there is nothing for him there. In this, he reminds us of the author himself and the descriptions of his own seekings in his autobiographical books, THIS STUBBORN SOIL and A SEASON OF WEATHERING. In fact, I'd offer the observation that Owens looked as much to himself as to any other source to find the inspiration for Jed's character. Because of its realistic depictions of the people and the environment of that time and place, it is challenging to remember that the happenings in this book are fiction, yet, because it is fiction, I must say that one character does not ring true. The peddler, that "son of Abraham" as the jailer describes him under his breath, is the savior of Jed and of Luster, literally buying their freedom from the chain gang and l

Look to the River

Based on a childhood experience observing a chain gang working on the roads near his home. I liked this book!