40 pages • 1 hour read
Saints at the River
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Character Analysis
Maggie Glenn
Not even 30, Maggie Glenn is nevertheless haunted. She lives almost entirely in her past, haunted by a lover she cannot forget and by a father she cannot forgive. Indeed, the first word of Maggie’s narrative is the single word “Ghosts” (7). Although she is referring to the spooky quiet of the newspaper offices where she works, ghosts define her character. Maggie struggles to live in two tenses simultaneously, past and present. The assignment that returns her to the South Carolina hill country gives her the chance to exorcise those ghosts and live tentatively in the present.
Maggie has made her father into a hobgoblin, a psychological complex that, for her, embodies the essence of parental neglect and emotional indifference. As a first-person narrative from Maggie’s perspective, the novel never engages the reader directly. Rather, the father is his daughter’s perception. As such, we begin to suspect that the father Maggie shares with us represents less who or what he is and more who and what Maggie is. More than 10 years after the kitchen accident, Maggie cannot forgive herself for the catastrophe that so disfigured her brother. She was older, and she was de facto left in charge. By demonizing her father, Maggie has been able to avoid accepting her own accountability. So, Maggie cannot find her way to peace despite the heroic presence of her brother, who challenges her to forgive the past.
The weekend experience with the Kowalsky child gives Maggie the opportunity at last to humanize her father, now dying of cancer, and thus let go of her anger and her regrets. The turning point in her evolution as a character comes when she recalls a moment when, after her grandfather’s funeral, her father evidenced genuine love for her. Although Rash avoids sentimentalizing Maggie’s reconciliation with her father, she moves as a character to embrace his imperfections and make her peace with him at last.
The other ghost in her life is Luke Miller. That relationship while she was in college had been life changing. Maggie learned not only about the power of nature, but about the power of love and the vulnerability of her own shattered heart. The reunion with Luke rekindles that passion briefly but gives her the opportunity to let it go and put her ex-lover into a therapeutic context—Luke was never hers to own or to lose for that matter, he always belonged to the river. This epiphany allows her to risk a new romance with Allen Hemphill.
Allen Hemphill
Just shy of 40, Allen Hemphill is at a midlife crossroads. He is conflicted: a journalist by profession who is expected to be objective, Allen is nevertheless burdened by a heart that cannot entirely shut itself off. As a journalist, he witnessed and reported on some of the most horrific conditions in central Africa; yet, his reporting reflected a sympathy with those victimized by the brutal military government. Luke suspects that Allen has a heart—although for Luke such emotionalism comes across as a criticism.
The turning point for Allen is the car accident that takes his wife and daughter at a time when he had been so wrapped up in his commitment to his career that he had neglected his family. Like Maggie, he must come to terms with the hobgoblin of his past, with his regrets and his anger. Learning too late that his priorities had been skewed means that when he meets Maggie, he is damaged and terrified of risking involvement. Since the accident, he has abandoned his career as a global journalist and is content to cover easy, safe, uncomplicated local feel-good stories. Like Maggie, he is haunted by ghosts. Like Maggie, he is more dead than alive, and like Maggie, he needs to be resurrected.
He understands his efforts to help Ruth’s grieving parents recover their dead daughter is a kind of necessary therapy and a way to exorcize the ghosts of his guilt. Thus, his experience in Tamassee permits him to risk involvement with Maggie and open his heart. Again, Rash refuses to indulge sentimentality: the romance between Maggie and Allen offers no clichéd “happily ever after” coda. Rather, Allen, like all of Rash’s heroic characters here, learns how to handle scars that cannot heal.
Luke Miller
What Maggie remembers most about Luke Miller were his eyes, somewhere between green and blue, like the color of the deep pools of the Tamassee itself: “When you looked into them it seemed you saw not into but through them, toward a place of utter clarity” (88). In the emotional showdown over the fate of the Tamassee, Luke brings that element of clarity. Rash could easily have reduced Luke Miller to a caricature, but Luke has both a heart and a soul. He is not easy to admire; nor is he easy to hate.
Uncompromising in his defense of the river, harshly judgmental toward those who seek ways to contravene federal laws protecting the wilderness, and snarky, even arrogant toward anyone who does not share his vision of eco-preservation, he brings to Rash’s narrative the ancient sense of nature as a powerful force that deserves respect. He accepts nature on its terms. He argues that once Ruth stepped into the river, she had to abide by the hard logic of the wilderness that is coolly indifferent to the little tragedies of our lives. For Luke, the Appalachian wilderness is not for people’s pleasure or profit but more a sanctuary, a privileged place apart from humanity’s grasping selfishness. He is eloquent, well-read. When he addresses the town, he brings to his scientific appreciation of an ecosystem and his articulation of the law, a sense of the river’s poetry and beauty. As such, he embodies an ideal that in the American literary tradition dates to the Transcendental vision of naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
Like Thoreau, Luke resists relationships as elaborate traps. His heart cannot be broken any more than the wild river he protects. He has no interest in monogamy, as Maggie learns. Rather, he is faithful to the river and what it means. In their canoe ride when Maggie is in college, he shares with her his sense of the raw energy and careless beauty of the river. Theirs is a most unconventional romance—she wants to fall in love, and he wants to create a convert to his cause. He is not without a heart—he is moved by the remarks of Ruth’s mother, and he is moved by the singular heroism of Randy Moseley—but in the end, Luke maintains the lonely faith in a wilderness he knows all too well is slowly being destroyed, a faith that is all the more heroic because it is futile.
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By Ron Rash
