Blood Line: Stories of Fathers and Sons Book

It says it proudly on the front cover: Blood Line is a collection of stories about fathers and sons. The first two stories, "Walking Out" and "Nathan's Rime", are the twin peaks of narrative climax and intrigue, while the third "Uriah's Letter" is a test of patience for the common reader and maintains an inverse relationship between its complexity and its reward.

"Walking Out" is a testament to the power of the short story, and, unfortunately for both Quammen and the reader, it casts a shadow over the remaining 140 pages of text by virtue of its quality and impression. It's an adventurous story about David, an eleven-year-old boy living with his mother in Evergreen Park IL, making his annual visit to his father in Montana. His father, as much a victim of the family disbandment as David, secures a moose tag and takes David up into the Crazy Mountains for what promises to be a rite-of-passage type experience. Unfortunately for David's father, the zeitgeist of the mountains and David's father's own lineage have little effect on David. The narrator heartbreakingly relates, "the boy knew what sort of thoughts his father was having. But he knew also that his own home was Evergreen Park, and that he was another man's boy now, with another man's name, though this was indeed his father"(8). And so Quammen establishes the central conflict of the story early on: the emotional distance between David and his father. The plot thickens when the pair, deep in the woods after bagging an elk, happen upon a mother bear and her cubs. With snow beginning to fall and the bears in close proximity, David and his father must struggle to conclude the hunt and make it back to their cabin.

Montana adventure becomes American grotesque in "Nathan's Rime". The story opens with Buddy Coop, having recently purchased 90 acres in Oregon with money from his deceased father's estate, working his land in the company of Nathan Buckle. Nathan, the previous landowner, stays to help Buddy work, all the while retelling the story of his own relationship with his father Abner. Abner was an abusive father who owned a roadside animal attraction called the Serpentarium. He owned hundreds of snakes and kept them in a giant pit, and he made Nathan clean the pit, as well as help him procure more snakes. As the story progresses, Nathan remembers living apart from his father for six years and establishing a muskrat farm on the Oregonian land on which he is now laboring. Unfortunately, Abner and his wife Bunny find Nathan after fleeing to his land from a criminal stint in California. Nathan, an adult now, finally stands up to his father during an argument, saying "You been six years away…if you wanted some more of them manners, you come about four years too late"(69). The inevitable conclusion follows Nathan's assertiveness as Nathan tells Buddy about how he finally had to address Abner once and for all.

"Uriah's Letter" is the novella concluding the collection, and, in a painfully ironic turn, it is twice as long and half as good as the preceding two stories. Where "Walking Out" and "Nathan's Rime" succeeded in their technical proficiency, thematic richness, brevity, and originality, "Uriah's Letter" fails because it feels like a non-medaling entry in a Faux Faulkner writing competition. "Uriah's Letter" is Absalom Absalom! and "A Rose for Emily" combined into one complicated and indeterminate story. Henry Graham, a Harvard youth a la Quentin Compson, and his college friend Ira are together retelling the story of the mythic Joseph Surrat and his life in Hadrian Mississippi. Boiled down, Graham's grandfather knew Surrat who stole Uriah James's wife while both Surrat and James are fighting in the Civil War. Uriah may still be alive after the war, and the son that was commonly thought to belong to Surrat and Uriah James's ex-wife Ruth by virtue of coitus after his death may actually be Uriah's son by virtue of coitus with Ruth before splitsville. Regardless, the resultant son's name is Chamberlain Surrat. The reader learns all of this information because Graham, along with his father the Reverend, was chosen by Chamberlain's ex-fiancé Miss Louisa Sterne (a la Rosa Coldfield) to function as the story's receptacle. In sum, both Henry and the reader are the recipients of a secondhand, 'living' history. In addition to the Absalomium character set and his own themes about lineage, Quammen's story also tries to capture the larger Faulknerian themes of North vs. South, truth vs. lies, history and who controls it, man as myth, THE CIVIL WAR, etc. If that all isn't too much, like drinking out of a fire hose, Quammen's stylistic choice to include a set of italicized instructions, written in the second-person, to encourage the reader to progress the story is as irritating as the yes/no truths that make up the discursive story itself.

In sum, Quammen's collection Blood Line is a feast-or-famine literary accomplishment. His short stories are compelling and replete with memorable characters and circumstances. His novella; however, is sure to disappoint anyone short of a Faulkner obsessive.