2025-07-03
POPULAR FICTION
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Deliverance
by James Dickey
Publisher Note:
The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the state's most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance.
Troy Note:
I struggled to get through this book. Two things kept hanging me up.
First, I bought a vintage paperback of this and cannot express to you how much it, the book, smells like my grandmother’s trailer home. I mean it is like you’re sitting in her living room with her metal tv cart in one corner, her electronic piano flanking it, and her doilied coffee table before you. The more than occassional wafts I kept getting made it hard for me to stay focused on the book, as it kept pulling me back to my childhood.
Second, I’ve concluded that if there was not a male rape in this book, we would have never heard about it—nor would there have been a movie about it, and if there was, we would have never heard of that either, Burt or no Burt.
Passage(s) of Note:
"A canoe trip?" he said, looking back and forth between us.
"That’s right," Lewis said, narrowing his eyes a little. "A canoe trip."
"You ever been down in there?"
"No," Lewis said. "Have you?"
Griner set his heavy-hanging face on Lewis; they battled in midair; the sound of crickets in the grass around the garage clashed like shields and armor plate. I could see the man was insulted; Lewis himself had told me that the worst thing you can do is to throw somethign back at these mountain people.
"No," Griver answered solwly. "I Ain’t never been down in there much. There Ain’t nothing to go down there for. Fishing’s no good."
"How about hunting?"
"Never been. But I don’t believe I’d go there if I was you. What’s the use of it?"
"Because it’s there," Lewis said, for my benefit.
"It’s there all right," Griver said. "If you git in there and can’t get out, you’re goin’ to wish it wudn’t."
"Well," Lewis said, "we screwed up."
"Maybe we’d better let them show us where the river is."
He backed into the weeds and manhandled the car around until we could get back on the track we had come down. When we reached the other road, the truck was waiting for us, wiht Drew’s car behind it. I had wondered why Drew hadn’t followed us, but it was like him to drop behind the truck; he didn’t know anything about where he was going, and he was willing to listen to somebody who did.
The first Griner leaned out of the cab. "Where you goin’, city boy?"
Lewis flushed. "Get on with it," he said.
"Naw, naw," Griner said. "Go on ahead. You’ll find it. Ain’t nothin’ but the biggest river in the state."
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