'River' siren

It’s easier to name a major author Bonnie Jo Campbell hasn’t been compared with (Edith Wharton comes to mind) than it is to tick off the long list of writers to whom she’s being compared: Eudora Welty, Mark Twain, Raymond Carver, Daniel Woodrell, Barbara Kingsolver and the Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, who might be Campbell’s first choice for comparison.

Not only does Campbell share O’Connor’s penchant for farm animals (Campbell has two pet donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote; O’Connor became famous at 6 years old  in a newsreel shown in movie houses around the world for training a chicken to walk backwards), they also share the love of writing about outsiders; Campbell often refers to them in her conversations as “troubled people.”

At a recent book signing and reading in Ann Arbor, Campbell made a point to say she has a “kinship with Southern grotesque writers,” and she isn’t the least bit annoyed by those who would compare her work to that of other authors. She says that’s how everyone organizes his or her brain.

“It’s how we orient ourselves,” she says. “It’s who we like to think we like to like.”

The Twain comparison seems particularly applicable, given that Campbell has written a book about a journey on a river, switching out Huck Finn for 16-year-old Margo Crane, a sharpshooting Lolita who goes in search of her lost mother.

Margo, like Huck, is destined to become one of those defining characters of literature, a self-assured, tough survivor of everything the river and its “outsider” inhabitants can throw at her.

Campbell said she reread “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” several times during her own literary journey, but she noticed it came up short for her in one area.

“More river — it needed more river,” she said. 

Campbell delivers on that statement, writing richly textured descriptions of a Michigan river similar to the writing of naturalist and Southerner Wendell Berry or Michigan’s own Jim Harrison.

“I was nervous about the beginning of the book (in which she writes lavishly about the river),” Campbell says. “I was indulgent about nature.”

The first sentence in the book sets the tone, as she describes the river that will become central to the plot: “The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart.”

She said she finds rivers so much more alive than oceans. “Oceans are so big, but a river, you can get right up on it. It is full of life. Something is always crawling in or out of it.”

Campbell grew up on a creek, and also spent time at her grandparents’ cottage on the St. Joseph River, gathering not just mollusks but memories that she would later use in her book.

She said she decided to write “Once Upon a River” after readers of “Q Road” wanted to know more about the past of Margo, the major character. Although written in 2002, “Q Road” is somewhat of a sequel to “Once Upon a River” and begins with a grown-up Margo and a 15-year-old daughter.

“I thought maybe there’s more to say about Margo, a middle-aged woman living on a houseboat. How would such a beautiful woman end up living on a houseboat?”

“Once Upon a River” eloquently provides that answer.

As in her books “Q-Road” and “American Salvage,” Campbell is especially proficient writing about those at the fringes of life, much like Woodrell did in “Winter’s Bone,” which features another teen in search of a lost parent.

In “Once Upon a River,” Campbell’s resourceful protagonist has the skills of a frontiersman: Hunting, fishing and trapping have become second nature to her. She can read the river and the forest and their inhabitants — some furry, some slithering — like a map. It takes her awhile to be able to do the same with people, especially men.

Margo takes up shooting for solace and as a way of centering herself after her beloved grandfather dies. Enamored by Annie Oakley (Campbell’s hero) and equipped with a Marlin Rimfire .22 rifle, just like Annie’s, Margo learns to shoot through endless practice and an uncanny natural ability.

Campbell writes of the experience: “Uncle Cal claimed credit for teaching her to shoot, but while Margo had felt his guidance, she had felt just as strongly the guidance of the gun itself. It held her steady, and then sadness perfected her aim.”

Campbell, a meticulous researcher, didn’t take writing about shooting to chance.

“I knew I would look dumb if I didn’t get it right,” she says. She consulted a friend who was a master target shooter and practiced with the same rifle she describes in the book until, as she says, “I got pretty good.” 

She even put the rifle on her shoulder and walked through her neighborhood to gauge response.

“None,” she said. “I’m like a method actor. I’m a method writer.”

In a similar way, she made sure she got one of the boats that Margo uses in the book just right. An advance reading copy of “Once Upon a River” had Margo in a powerboat — until a relative of Campbell’s pointed out the type of river she describes calls for a pontoon. Campbell went out and found one made in Michigan — a Playbuoy — which she then carefully wove into the book.

The meticulous research does not distract from her beautiful prose, which, like the river she writes about, can hold danger around every bend.

The book has come under so much scrutiny from reviewers that Campbell says she a little embarrassed by all the attention. “Writing is such a private thing, and I’m out in the world now.”

Her privacy really ended two years ago when “American Salvage” was named a finalist for the National Book Award. It was then she stepped onto the fast track.

Before the publication of “Salvage,” she was at a low ebb, having lost her agent. “She dumped me,” Campbell says.

As a backstop, “American Salvage” was published by Wayne State University Press, and Campbell was agent-less until the National Book Award finalists were announced: “And the next day I had 50 e-mails from — guess who? — agents.”

As to being compared to “Huckleberry Finn,” Campbell said, “I can’t begin to compare myself to Twain. ‘Huck Finn’ was a touchstone for me writing the book, but Margo and Finn are vastly different. Huck is a huckster and clever. He toys with people, while Margo is much more straightforward. She’s a survivor, and the need for survival is a different story, especially among gals. I’m just writing stories about troubled people struggling to survive.”