For Nature to Have a Shot at Winning

 

James Dickey’s Deliverance joined our literary canon forty years ago, opening with the unfurling of a map: “It rolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose.” Curling, snapping. The defensive gestures of a coiled snake. But Ed Gentry tells us that he, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew “put our four steins on its corners,” and nature submits—for the moment. Deliverance became the ’70s epitome of man vs. nature (as well as man vs. himself and man vs. concupiscent hillbilly), and although it relied heavily on themes already explored by folks like Conrad, Melville, and Hemingway, the book is a singular achievement of backwoods physical horror and equally horrific self-discovery. 
In his debut novel The Wilding, Benjamin Percy presents his own map, and it sounds familiar: “Slowly he unrolls the map and when he tries to lay it flat, to smooth it with his hand, it snaps back, curling up again.” More snapping and curling, but this time, instead of using heavy steins filled with strong beer to corral the map-snake, The Wilding’s suburbanized twenty-first-century men “set Starbucks coffee cups upon its corners.”
This passage, while clearly an homage, nevertheless points to an inescapable fact: The Wilding comes off as little more than a modernized Deliverance. A group of unsatisfied males venture into a wilderness the weekend before that wilderness is scheduled to disappear. The unsatisfied males slowly lose control of their surroundings as nature and man act upon them. A casual male-bonding weekend turns into survival of the fittest. And then the unsatisfied males are failed by their twenty-first-century gadgets—including a cell phone that can’t raise a signal at a critical moment—so that the reader can nod his head along with the protagonist when he wonders whether the “real mystery of life” might just be “who you’ll end up being consumed by? Or what you’ll end up consuming?”
That protagonist is Justin Caves, an English teacher in suburbanizing Bend, Oregon. He and his wife Karen, the school district’s dietician, used to recite poetry to each other, but Karen has withdrawn after a recent miscarriage, disappearing into organic food, Internet medical research, and a jogging habit that tiptoes on the border of obsession. Justin has only a handful of lukewarm friends, and little connection with his son Graham, a twelve-year-old blond fingerling who always has his eyes on a video game, a book, or a digital camera. Justin has grown tired of his job, tired of struggling with his wife, and tired of being the suburbanite milquetoast that his father, Paul, pegs him as.
Paul is The Wilding’s version of Dickey’s Lewis Medlock, a man at home in the wilderness, a man more comfortable holding a power tool than his son’s hand. Paul berates Justin for any sign of emotional or physical need, he wonders aloud how the two of them share the same blood, and then he refers to his hunting dog as “my boy.” Justin despises the way he feels around Paul, and yet, like Ed Gentry with Lewis Medlock, he has a fascination with the man’s physicality—in particular with Paul’s hands, “big brown things” that “rake through his beard like paws through rotting wood,” hands that “seem capable of tearing phone books in half and uprooting trees with a tug.” In other words, the hands of a man strong enough to control his environment. (Compare this to when Ed Gentry watches Lewis trace lines on that map-snake in Deliverance: “I watched the hand rather than the location, for it seemed to have power over the terrain.”)
Justin is afraid that he’ll never be able to match his father’s mountain man bearing. Despite being told by his mother that the two men are of equal height, Justin can’t bring himself to believe her, and this perceived failure to measure up to another man is, in essence, what both The Wilding and Deliverance are about.
In Dickey’s novel, four men decide to canoe a river that is days away from being dammed. In Percy’s, the three Caves men (yeah, I know—and so does Percy) take their rifles to Echo Canyon, which is slated to be cleared in the coming weeks to make way for a golf resort. In Dickey, the crew is beset by gun- and erection-toting hillbillies. In Percy, a local townie terrorizes the Caves by slashing tires, breaking windows, and threatening physical violence. There’s a river, there’s wildlife, there’s an undercurrent of eco-politics, and so on.
Benjamin Percy knows all this. He shows an awareness of the debt owed to James Dickey through an epilogue and several tongue-in-cheek references, and he certainly realizes that there’s no avoiding comparisons to Deliverance when you drop a group of males into the woods. Thematically, Percy just doesn’t have much to say that we haven’t heard before. For this reason, his novel’s effectiveness must be measured by other factors, including the originality of its nuances and its degree of suspense. And this is where The Wilding comes up a bit short.
In a successful man vs. nature narrative, we truly believe that nature has a shot at winning. In Deliverance, some men go in, fewer men come out, and we’re actually surprised that any of them emerge. This is part of what makes Dickey’s novel genuinely compelling—no one knows the outcome until the end.
Not so for The Wilding. Men go in and men come out, but we never really worry for their safety. The outcome is predictable, and the climax is so ho-hum that we’re just as interested in what’s going on back in Bend.
Well, here’s what Karen has been up to in Bend: lots and lots of jogging, two potential forays into adultery, and a moderate amount of soul-searching. It would have been fun to see Percy do more with this character, but in spite of his efforts to make her more colorful—dismissing her husband for being too “tame,” she gnaws through a raw steak over dinner—Karen never rises above her rather mundane problems to become a vivid female counterpoint to all of those males on the loose.
Still, Percy had one more chance to do something memorable, to give his readers a sketch of a character with uniquely twenty-first century problems. Enter Brian, an Iraq vet who returns from the war with a shrapnel scar on his head, blistering, debilitating headaches, and a sewing kit. Feeling disconnected from suburban U.S.A., Brian traps small animals, skins them, and sews together their pelts to create a full bodysuit that he dons whenever civilization makes him feel trapped. He senses a connection when he meets Karen, and soon begins stalking her from inside his fur suit, for Brian “understands that he is simply an animal, and as an animal he can be either prey or predator, a target or the arrow that hastens toward it.”
But Percy makes two questionable moves with this potentially fascinating subplot. The first is implying that Brian’s is a sexual fetish. Brian skins the animals “as if pulling a damp nightgown from a woman,” and once inside the fur suit, he has a constant erection. The second is revealing that this is a preexisting fetish: Brian recalls dressing in an ape suit as an eighth grader, wearing it around the house when he’s alone. His father throws the ape suit in the trash, but Brian “hasn’t stopped thinking about it.” So, a potential exploration of the effects of the Iraq war on our soldiers instead becomes little more than the re-emergence of a preexisting fetish, with unexplored sexual overtones. Brian’s subplot fizzles out, and Karen is never really in harm’s way. And neither are the Caves men, whose story lacks the sense of impending doom that makes Deliverance such a thrill.
Make no mistake, Benjamin Percy has the ability to create work that stands on its own hind legs and roars. He has a vivid, grotesque imagination and the writing chops to paint fierce scenes, such as the Caves’ ghastly food fight with deer entrails; a wonderful description of a bear attack, with a young girl’s scalp “finally sliding off her skull”; and a flame-engulfed owl frantically seeking escape from a suburban house. Percy is at home here in central Oregon, and he writes comfortably. But with comfort comes familiarity. We’ve read this story before, and with much whiter knuckles.