Once Upon A (Michigan) River

Margo Crane first enchanted readers in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s 2009 short story “Family Reunion.”
Meeting her again in Campbell’s novel “Once Upon A River” is an even larger treat. Margo, the Annie Oakley-wannabe heroine of this latest novel, has been compared to Huck Finn and Odysseus.
These comparisons, though, minimize the decency of the teenage Margo, who is not so much larger than life but rather as unadorned as life. A sharp shooting interloper and outsider in the clannish Murray family of Campbell’s fictional southern Michigan burg “Murrayville,” Margo’s yearnings for family and purpose personify the same fundamental longings recognized by everyone who has experienced family turmoil.
Cast adrift when her mother abandons her and by her father’s inability to understand her untamed impulses, Margo early on learns to fend for herself around the riverside home she shares with her father, just across the water from the Murrays. In part, Margo’s outsider status is sealed long before she is born, as her father, Bernard Crane, is “born the bastard son of Dorothy Crane and Old Man Murray during his bout of infidelity.”
When calamity soon visits, Margo discovers, “For the first time in a year, she was, horribly, part of the family.” The Murrays are expected to rally around the teen at this crucial moment, but she instead lights out along the Stark River in her teak rowboat “The River Rose,” given to her by her grandfather, Old Man Murray.
Campbell’s evocation of the elemental pull of the river on Margo’s burgeoning awareness is consistent as well as convincing. On the first night she spends at home without her father, “She smelled the river in every corner of the house, in every molecule of the air, in every pore of her own body.”
Margo next embarks on a series of sometimes heartbreaking but always heart-rending adventures, involving a cast of low brow characters like Brian and Paul, meth-making brothers who prowl the river for treasure, real or imagined, and Michael, whose river dog Cleo Margo renames “King,” because though a female, she stalks the river like a kingfisher.
Her journey’s purpose, ulimately, is to find her mother Luanne, whom Margo remembers as cocoa butter and white wine. Luanne left her husband and daughter, unable to cope with the closed nature of Murrayville. Rumored to be upstream, in Heart of Pines, Luanne becomes Margo’s destination.
Upstream or down, Margo pilots the banks of the Stark River as she navigates the edges of society. Unwilling to return to the stifling expectations of Murrayville, she instead journeys in and out of trouble, accompanied always by the .22 caliber Marlin rifle she appropriates from uncle Cal before leaving the family decay.
Eventually, in the emphysema-riddled Smoke, his dog Midnight, and his friend Fishbone, Margo finds both purpose and place, though she is no more settled than before, as Luanne remains in still uncharted waters.
“Once Upon A River” captivates as it startles, because Margo Cranes leaves in her wake a tale illustrating the confluence of calamity and connection.
Good Reading.