Slow River [Paperback]

Griffith is a poet with the heart of a victim who survives. This is a novel about intimate abuse, and it is gritty and close-up and provocative in its intense and lyrical flow. We are set inside the mind of the victim as she slowly realizes the horrific attack which has been taken against her whole person. It is the parable of her efforts to re-discover her personal history and to try and come to terms with it and to shape a new future for herself.

This is the poignant and moving drama of one woman's youth which was stolen in a brutal and yet very common manner. Lore Van de Oest is one of the daughters of a wealthy family of international entrepreneurs. She is a favorite of her father and she is climbing the corporate ladder of her grandmother's empire. One day, she is kidnapped and held for ransom. She is humiliated and believes she is abandoned. She has suspected a rift between her father and her mother. Thinking she will be murdered, she desperately escapes and is found by another woman in an alley, bleeding and traumatized. Taken in by Spanner, a con artist, Lore reluctantly learns to survive against a hostile world of other con artists, gangsters, and the wiles of the idle rich from whence she sprang. She also learns piece by piece of her abuse at the hands of, she believes, her beloved father. Determined to shun all of that, she adopts a false identity and takes a job in a pollution control plant, owned by her family's empire. She falls in love with a female worker there. She makes a break from her benefactor, Spanner. She finally comes to term with her strange, broken family.

The novel is told in three perspectives: from the young Lore as she grows up, and is finally kidnapped; from a first person point of view as she redefines her life; and from a parallel viewpoint in the third person as she survives with the cooperative wits of Spanner. For empathy, I believe you can't go far astray in this kind of story.

Griffith has written an absorbing and riveting novel about sexual abuse in the high frontier of modern society. A victim is lost to her own family and to her self. She is an unknown entity who needs to start all over. She has to deal with the demons and ghosts of her abuse without at first knowing what they mean or where they came from. She has horribly tough decisions to make. Lore is the classic victim here, thrown from a life of plenty into a life at a low and savage level. Incest and family conflicts are commoner than we like to think. Lore feels driven toward a lesbian lifestyle because she believes her father has abused her and turned her off men forever. A surprising turn of events makes this more bizarre and unexpected as we see the final solution to her nightmare years.

Griffith won the 1996 Nebula prize for this novel. Her previous novel, also dealing with sexual relationships gone astray, was the highly acclaimed Ammonite.

In SF, unlike its sister genre fantasy, there has been a history of dealing with issues of homosexuality in an unflinching, honest fashion (instead of fantasy's fey princes and twisted perverts) and while those issues have not really grasped mainstream SF, it's always been there, blatantly stated in Samuel Delany writings and others, lurking in Disch, in Ballard, from the sixties and seventies onward, incorporating sexuality matter of factly, almost explicitly so. There have been subgenres, of course, as there are in any major genre, but for the most part it's not really shocking or scandalous to see homosexuality represented in SF. And so awarding the Nebula to this novel both gladdens and confuses me. Gladdens, because it is a fine, tightly constructed novel, exploring its characters with a depth normally reserved for such masters as Margaret Atwood (when it comes to charactization and studies, at least). Confuses, because there is nothing really explicitly "groundbreaking" about it. The plot, while entertaining and thought provoking, breaks no real new ground, either by busting down nonexistent barriers regarding homosexuality in SF or providing a mindwarping new way of looking at the artiface of Story. The story itself, on the surface, is simple. Lore, a children born into a ridiculously wealthy family is kidnapped and tormented. Eventually she escapes and instead of going back to her family tries to live out among society, where she meets master scammer Scanner, among other people. Eventually she tries to form her own identity, working as the lowest employee on the type of thing her own family patented. The novel's structure is interesting, in that it jumps between Lore's childhood and her tightly sketched family (even the briefly glimpsed ones feel real, and even small moments resonate), then to her life with Scanner and then to the present day where she finally finishes the journey of finding herself. The fact that Lore is a lesbian is treated astonishingly well, there is no cliched "coming out" moment, she begins the story as a lesbian and that is just the way things are. People turned off by homosexuality probably should avoid this book, while I didn't find the scenes too explicit (certainly nowhere near pornographic, as some reviewers have tried to claim) and frankly they don't take up too many scenes in the novel itself, for some people, one scene may be one scene too many. And those people are entitled to their opinions and shouldn't read things that make them unhappy or uncomfortable. And this is a novel that deals with unpleasant things, and faces them boldly and obliquely, much like we do in real life. Slow River is a good book, perhaps even a great book. Does it deserve to stand up with past Nebula winners such as Dune or Ender's Game or A Time of Changes (and before you think that I'm biased toward SF written by white males, I thoroughly enjoyed Russ' The Female Man, so there) . . . I don't think so, but I also don't know what the competition was that year. It doesn't really matter. If the giant block letters proclaiming it to be a "Nebula Award Winner!" capture your attention enough to entice you to read the book, then that's all well and good. For in the end it's a fine example of SF doing what it does best, reflecting our lives and taking real people and real emotions and putting them in a fantastic setting, so while the background may be unfamiliar, the rest isn't.

Left for dead by her kidnappers, Lore is found by the mysterious woman Spanner, who teaches her to survive by her wits and to live in the dark world of crime. The two become lovers, but Lore wants legitimacy and to heal from her various wounds (her past with her family, her weeks with the kidnappers), so she leaves, taking a new identity, and tries to fit in. Ultimately, Lore cannot run from her demons forever, and she must either choose to stay in the shadows or to face the truths of her past. Set in the not-so-distant future, "Slow River" weaves Lore's pasts and present together into an astonishingly compelling tale. At the heart of the book is the story of a young woman healing from abuse, and the science fiction aspects are simply the setting and enhancing details. "Slow River" is the type of book that transcends whatever genre in which it's placed: it's more than a science fiction story, more than a coming-of-age story, more than a lesbian love story, more than a story of healing from abuse. This is a book that makes one believe in the power of fiction.