Deliverance by James Dickey

Let me start off by saying that I've seen the movie Deliverance a few times, and it certainly burns in one's memory. I don't know how one can ever forget the scene of Ned Beatty being raped by vicious hillbillies. Rough stuff. On to the book.

Deliverance details the canoeing trip of 4 upper middle-class Atlanta men. Seemingly a dull idea for a book (the anomie of the middle class, yadda, yadda, yadda), James Dickey turns it into a magnificent story. The men of the book, Ed Gentry (our narrator), Lewis, Bobby, and Drew, are all fairly well off friends who at Lewis's urging, decide to go on a canoe trip on a wild river in rural north Georgia. At least from Ed's perspective, he needs to find something different and break away for a while from the mundane office life and do something different. One can assume that the others feel the same way. So our intrepid canoeists head to the river...and everything goes wrong.

They start by meeting rough and tumble hayseed-types who they're make fun of and talk down to, yet at the same time are afraid of. And it's clear that the country folk don't like these city slickers very much at all. Once they get the canoes in the river, it's clear that most of the main characters don't know what they're doing and have no business being on such a difficult river. Other problems erupt when they come across a couple of armed hillbillies. Suffice it to say that things go very poorly for at least one of the members of the group. To say much more about the plot would be to give away what makes this book great: the story.

Dickey gives us a story of man versus nature and man versus his primal self. He makes us examine what getting back to nature really means. Should one even want to go back to nature? While she's beautiful, Mother Nature is heartless as well. On the other hand, Dickey explains the exhilaration of living life so on the edge and so in the moment. The story is so incredibly compelling that it's very hard to put the book down. No doubt this is an American Classic.