River Teeth by David James Duncan

River Teeth Reviews

• 
  Meredith Holley

  One summer in high school, I lived at this camp on the Oregon coast. It was kind of a run-down place that a family owned. They would let high-school kids come there and run the place as staff while different groups of campers from different types of churches and high-school groups would come through. The girl staffers slept in bunks in one house, and the guys slept in this apartment over the gym. It was all kind of
  Empire Records, if that movie is actually how I remember it from watching it in high school. Or, like,
  Hey Dude, but Oregon-coast style, not dude ranch. Anyway, for a week, we lived on the Rogue River, and it was probably one of the best experiences of my life. Just a bunch of high school kids camping out (with adult-ish supervision). I grew up in the San Juan Islands, and on and around the Rogue and Illinois rivers, but I don’t think of the Ocean and rivers or visit them like I should. They are like blood: I take them for granted, but when I remember to, I do appreciate their beauty, and I know I would shrivel without them.
  
  I finished my second year of law school this week, so I took the opportunity to read River Teeth, drink three greyhounds, and get nostalgic about Oregon rivers. I love that DJD loves Oregon rivers because they deserve to be loved. He is maybe a little sentimental in that hippie, rain-stick kind of way that gets to me sometimes, but when he stays out of that territory, he is my favorite ever. Ever. This is kind of a strange collection of stories. He pulled them together with the idea that they are river teeth, he explains in the very beginning. When trees fall into rivers, the current quickly decomposes their trunks, except for the knots where a branch joined a trunk, or other knots where the wood is particularly dense. Those, he explains, stay in the river much longer, and they jut up from the ground like river teeth. In the same way, Duncan goes on, time washes over our lives, and the moments that don’t decompose in our memories are like river teeth. So, this collection of stories is made up of those startling moments, the memories seared into his identity. Or, stories he heard from other people of their river teeth. I like the concept.
  
  Otherwise, there is not much to unify one story from another. Some are Duncan’s stories, others he invented or transcribed from friends. I liked all of them, but I loved The Garbage Man’s Daughter. I, like, love this story, you guys. I laughed so hard at one part that I couldn’t read the pages and had to get up and walk around for a while. Then, when I came back, I still couldn’t read the story. It needs to be read. It is an outstanding story. I looked for an online copy to post here for you to read, but I couldn’t find one. You should find it and read it.
  
  There is some dangerous territory in this book, though.
  The Brothers K is a perfect book in my eyes, and there is a story at the end of this book that happens after
  The Brothers K, and I feel that it spoils a lot of that book. I don’t necessarily know if the information would be hanging over you when you read
  The Brothers K, but I think it would influence your read of that book and those characters. I would rather you read that book than this, but you should still read The Garbage Man’s Daugher. I love it ever so.
  
  The stories at the very beginning of this book are really wonderful. They are of Duncan’s childhood, and they are truly horrifying and memorable. There is also a story interestingly dedicated to Katherine Dunn, for all those
  Geek Love lovers out there. At the end of the book, the stories get increasingly sentimental and tie-dyed, as Duncan gets increasingly that way. I can handle that to a point, but, I don’t know. I do think he is wise, and I don’t disagree with anything he’s saying. He just goes a little to sentimental/poetical for me ever so slightly and every once in a while. Not in
  The Brothers K. He goes just the right amount of far in that book, as I recall. In the others, though, I just hear didgeridoos and rain sticks in the background every once in a while. And, like, Yanni. For some, that is a compliment, and I can see where it would be just the right thing in some circumstances. For me, It goes just slightly too far, every once in awhile. Then, usually, he’ll say something with all kinds of perspective that is totally hilarious, and it will reel me back in (fishing metaphor, tres apropos!).
  
  Duncan is wonderful on fishing and rivers and baseball and personal mythology. He’s great with a subtle pun, and he’s kind. This was a lovely book. Have I told you to go read The Garbage Man’s Daughter yet? Well, go. It is a hilarious story. He is so kind about families and the way family personalities destroy and invent each other. He does that so well. I had been thinking for weeks that I wanted to re-read
  The Brothers K, but then I remembered that I had this one and hadn’t gotten to it yet. In a lot of ways, I’m glad I read this instead. But, I still miss that book and can’t wait to get back to it someday. Anyway, Duncan talks about rivers and families, and explains things that he understands instinctively about those things that I love and don't understand. One of my heroes.
• 
  Kate

  Damn fine
• 
  Kerri Anne

  I can't properly review this set of stories without getting emotional and I'm not in the mood to get emotional, so I'll just say: David James Duncan gets me. And I only wish I'd known about this book in 1995 when I was cutting some of my biggest of all river teeth.
  
  
  [Five stars for multiple stories that will no doubt forever ebb and flow through my literary memory.]
• 
  Beck Henreckson

  I don't know if I could ever give short stories 5 stars — but this was close. I love DJD so so much. So many of these were so beautiful. And while they were all separate, there was a coherency that I often struggle to find in collections of short stories, which drew me in more. The way Duncan writes about nature really resonates with me, and he explores so well how beauty and pain, the transcendent and the mundane, the heavenly and the grotesque, are wed in our lives.
  
  I just learned he had a new novel come out last year (after 30 years 😮) and I'm so thrilled.
• 
  Mark

  I had mixed feelings about his novel The River Why but this collection of stories, set in the Pacific Northwest was a much better fit for me. Dark, with a nice smart edge to it.
• 
  Anne Farrer

  One of my favourite authors. I like the discipline of the short stories and the range of characters/scenes you get to experience. His writing is like river teeth for me.
• 
  smoh cat

  Reading this then thought about this is exactly the type of things I wished I would write when I grew up.
• 
  Megan

  I re-read all the non-fictional accounts in this book (which are interspersed with stories), looking for good sample essays for my students. Not at all helping myself to narrow it down, I dog-eared every single one. After years of debating it with myself, Duncan is my all-time favorite writer. Now, I'm not picky and I've never met a book I didn't at least respect (it's hell writing those things I'll wager), but Duncan's style is just the style I'd choose for myself. He's the one I'd emulate, the one I'd be compared to if I should be so lucky.
  
  The best part about his writing is the emotion he evokes (make me cry, David). One minute I'm weeping over the image of a school of salmon who are hurling themselves into a paper mill's cesspool of a dumping ground, which has been channeled carelessly into the Columbia River. The salmon are following an ancient, genetically embedded route back to their breeding grounds, and the mill has stopped up their path with rot and poison.
  
  The next moment I'm giggling obscenely over the main character of the story Not Rocking the Boats (okay, I was reading the fiction parts by now too), who is a passenger in a car being maniacally driven by one of his fishing buddies. Beer is flowing freely into the mouths of all, including the driver:
  
  "I am, by the way, a wine man. Macro-brewed American beer makes me belch, then fart, then puts me to sleep, then gives me carbonated nightmares, then wakes me with a sprained bladder, aching head and killing thirst. But I recalled reading somewhere that the limp bodies of drunks sometimes survive even devastating car wrecks. So the open containers, in my case, were a kind of safety equipment."
  
  I will keep re-reading my precious few David James Duncan books until he publishes his next one. But I'm waiting.
• 
  notgettingenough

  Ever since starting this, I've wondered how to review it without spoiling it.
  
  I don't just mean the risks of giving it away. I mean I kept wanting to cut expressions and sentences and ideas out and paste them here, but even as I pictured it each time, while sitting alongside the lake being infused by the beauty both of this book and the setting, and the joy of the company I was in, I felt it would cheapen and spoil the things I was trying to show off.
  
  I confess, the last few stories did not live up to the others, but instead of reading them in a blissful state, I was sleep-deprived and sad. Does this ever suit a book? I'm trying to remember, but I'm too tired! Can one blame the book for the consequences? Surely not.
  
  If you have the least interest in short pieces - stories, I suppose - read this, you won't regret it.
  
  Sometimes he starts with an idea from elsewhere. I especially liked this.
  
  "Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there." Runi
  
• 
  Matt

  “Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches." And these stories are precisely the same sort of thing, river teeth that linger, a bit of language here and there lost in love, the moment that stretches on. They're the best of Duncan's formidable gifts when they're on, these words, and they're of the same stock as our most pungent experiences, too - the moments that stick and sink and soar and keep us awake sometimes in the wee hours of a morning. I'd say more, if I knew what to say.
  
  [5 stars for the stories that are so perfectly complete. Which isn't all of them. But is certainly enough to warrant five stars.]
• 
  Wyatt Hull

  This collection of memoirs and short fiction truly deserves an entirely higher caliber of cover design. Multiple calibers higher, even. Don't let that self-published vibe run you off. Of the many profound and hilarious pieces, The Mickey Mantle Koan was my favorite, a very evocative elegy and expression of grief – and something I'm seeking out to share with others. Threads of the memoir sections reminded me of All New People by Anne Lamott, hints of John McPhee bubbled up during each encounter on or near or in a river, and in his most free-wheeling sections of fiction, Tom Robbins.
  
• 
  Jim

  
  
  This book was recommended to me by a friend whose literary opinions I respect. Nevertheless, the book was not very interesting to me. I just read a review comparing this author with Harper Lee. Nope. I think not. The stories seemed to me to be a weird combination of Zen, surrealism and half hearted attempts at fishing stories.
  
  I found myself resenting having to wade through countless digressions from a stories that are little more than narratives with the title "All About Me".
  
  I will not be reading any more of Mr. Duncan's books.
• 
  peg

  pick it up.
  read Red Coat. it's 3 pages long. if that story doesn't make you want to read the whole book then you've only lost 10 minute of your life and save yourself $15.99.
  
  i bet you'll buy it though.
• 
  Anita

  good altogether, again touching on his favorite subjects of fishing, water, baseball, religion.
  
  my favorite essays were:
  The Garbageman's Daughter
  River Teeth: a Definition
  Kali's Personal
  The Mickey Mantle Koan
  
  there were probably a couple of other really good ones, but i can't recall them now. he's always taking me by surprise by his imaginative rants. and he comes in with these short stories in all different angles, taking on all different personalities. some work better than others, but as a whole, a work worthy of praise.
  
  an excerpt, found on amazon. the first essay:
  
  "A Definition
  
  When an ancient streamside conifer falls, finally washed or blown from its riverbank down into the water, a complex process of disintegration begins. The fallen tree becomes a naked log, the log begins to lead a kind of afterlife in the river, and this afterlife is, in some ways, of greater benefit to the river than was the original life of the tree.
  
  A living tree stabilizes riverbanks, helps cool water temperatures, provides shade and cover for fish, shelter for mammals and birds. But fallen trees serve some of the same purposes, and other crucial ones besides. The gradual disintegration of a log in a streambed creates a vast transfusion of nutrients--a slow forest to river feast reaching from the saprophytic bottom of the food chain to the predatory, fly-casting, metaphor-making top. Downed trees are also part of a river's filtration system: working in concert in logjams, they become flotsam traps; mud, leaf and carcass traps; Styrofoam, disposable-diaper and beer-can traps. And they're a key element in river hydraulics: a log will force current down, digging a sheltering pocket or spawning bed for trout or salmon; over, creating a whitewater spill that pumps life-giving oxygen into the stream; or around, sometimes digging the salmonid's version of a safe room with a view, the undercut bank.
  
  On the forest streams I know best—those of the Oregon Coast Range clearcuts, "tree farms" and remnant strips of rainforest—the breakdown of even a five- or six-hundred-year-old river log takes only a few decades. Tough as logs are, the grinding of sand, water and ice are relentless. Within a decade or two any drowned conifer but cedar turns punk, grows waterlogged and joins the rocks and crayfish as features of the river's bottom. I often glance down at my feet while fishing and see that the "rock" I'm standing on is really the top of a gigantic log sunk and buried in gravel and sand. And even after burial, decomposition continues. The log breaks into filaments, the filaments become gray mush, the mush becomes mud, washes downriver, comes to rest in side channels. The side channels fill and gradually close. New trees sprout from the fertile muck. The cycle goes on.
  
  There are, however, parts of every drowned tree that refuse to become part of this cycle. There is, in every log, a series of cross-grained, pitch-hardened masses where long-lost branches once joined the tree's trunk. "Knots," they're called, in a piece of lumber. But in the bed of a river, after the parent log has broken down and vanished, these stubborn masses take on a very different appearance, and so perhaps deserve a different name. "River teeth" is what we called them as kids, because that's what they look like. Like enormous fangs, often with a connected, cross-grained root. It took me awhile to realize, when I found my first, that it had once been part of a tree. Having grown up around talk of "headwaters" and "river mouths," it was easier for me to imagine it having washed loose from a literal river's jaw than having once joined a branch to an evergreen.
  
  I don't know how long these teeth last, but even on the rainy coast I'd guess centuries: you sense antiquity when you heft one. Because their pitch content is so high, and hardened pitch outlasts the grainy wood fiber, the oldest teeth lose much of their resemblance to wood. Some look like Neolithic hand tools, others like mammals—miniature seals, otters, manatees. Still others resemble art objects—something intelligently worked, not just worn. And to an extent this is what they become. There is life in rivers, and strength; there are countless grinders and sanders: in a relic the waters have shaped so long, why wouldn't we begin to glimpse the river's mind and blind artistry?
  
  With my trees, logs, and river in place, I'd like to piece together a metaphor: our present-tense human experience, our lives in the inescapable present, are like living trees. Our memory of experience, our individual pasts, are like trees fallen in a river. The current in that river is the passing of time. And a story—a good, shared story—is a transfusion of nutrients from the old river log of memory into the eternal now of life. But as the current of time keeps flowing, the aging log begins to break down. Once-vivid impressions begin to rot. Years run together. We try to share, with an old friend or spouse, some "memorable" past experience and end up arguing instead about details that don't jibe. Chunks of the log begin to vanish completely. Someone approaches us in a crowd, his face lights up, he says his name, tells us of a past connection—and we shake his hand and grin through our horror, unable to place him at all. Some of us realize, after being endlessly corrected, that there are portions of our pasts we can no longer weave into accurate narratives. Others of us realize, after sharing the same accurate narratives for decades, that we have somehow talked our allotment of stories to death, that no one listens any longer, that when we tell these old tales the room fills with a dark water and our listeners' eyes glaze. So we stop telling them. We let them decompose. The last filaments of memory become gray mush, the mush becomes mud, the mud washes downriver. New life, and new stories, sprout from the silence.
  
  There are, however, small parts of every human past that resist this natural cycle: there are hard, cross-grained whorls of memory that remain inexplicably lodged in us long after the straight-grained narrative material that housed them has washed away. Most of these whorls are not stories, exactly: more often they're self-contained moments of shock or of inordinate empathy; moments of violence, uncaught dishonesty, tomfoolery; of mystical terror; lust; preposterous love; preposterous joy. These are our "river teeth"—the time-defying knots of experience that remain in us after most of our autobiographies are gone.
  
  A true river tooth experience is usually old; until the narrative fiber that surrounded the event turns punk and vanishes, one can't be sure it possesses the adamantine quality that is its chief attribute. Most are also fairly brief—just as actual wooden river teeth are fairly small. In my own such experiences I am more often acted upon than actor; more eye than body; more witness than hero. Yet the emotional impact of such experiences is often huge. Some river tooth experiences, if shared with the wrong person, would certainly wound, and could perhaps even kill. Others, whether shared or not, possess the solidity of a geographer's bearing marker and help us find our way. Almost everyone, I believe, owns scores of these old knots and whorls. Yet—perhaps because they lack a traditional narrative's flow from beginning to middle to end—I hear few people speak of such experiences.
  
  There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind. My hope, in sharing a few personal river teeth here, is to let go of what can't be saved, to honor what can and perhaps to make others more aware of, and more willing to accept and share, the same cycle in themselves."
• 
  Jeremy

  Leave it to David James Duncan to turn river detritus into a metaphor for life. But, as he explains it, it kind of works. What he calls river teeth are the knots on dead trees that have fallen into a river and have been washed and worked over by the rushing waters and sand to form "these stubborn masses" that "take on a very different appearance" than what they originally looked like. To him, this also represents stories in our lives, moments, that have been divorced from their surrounding context, but remain, almost as a relic. It's these stories and writings that form his collection called River Teeth. It's made up of both nonfiction, his recollections, such as the poignant "The Mickey Mantle Koan" about the death of his older brother and a signed baseball from Mantle himself that arrived a day after his death, and fiction, my favorite being "The Garbage Man's Daughter," about a fact obsessed girl that comes to believe that the garbage man is some sort of mystical, mythical creature in line with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Jesus. Duncan's stories all contain a link about seeing life as it is, as it was, and as it could be, and accepting it all as one, seeing the beauty and the majesty in it. We get some very Duncan touches, such as using the aforementioned river, baseball, Oregon, and Zen Buddhism to filter his thoughts and ideas through and use to explain what is otherwise unexplainable. Duncan is at his best when he freewheels and lets his narrative and language escape from their prescribed roles, making his longer pieces more powerful in their Duncan-ness. His aim is to let River Teeth help define his river teeth, and maybe even have you discover yours.
• 
  Kathryn

  Duncan writes eloquently and with great insight. In this collection of stories and vivid personal memories, the memories impressed me a bit more than the stories but that is probably because Duncan and I were born in the same year and have several siblings who feature in our memories. There are two longer stories that baffled me -- that's not a complaint -- and I always enjoy learning a new word or two, in this case "saprophytic" and "metanoias".
• 
  Samantha

  This book was left in a Little Free Library with the name "North" inscribed inside the front cover and several of the stories' titles underlined in bold scrawled pencil.
  
  Thank you, North, for sharing something that you'd cared about enough to notate with a stranger. I wonder if you'd hoped it would resonate with whoever found it there. Rest assured: it did. It's found an appreciative home.
• 
  Erica

  I wanted to read something with pretty language and a short attention span and this mostly was. Some pieces, of course, resonated more than others, and some ideas aged better than others, but...it got me through the last month, which is all I asked of it.
• 
  Danielle Pride

  Read for school, fell in love with the description and narrative. I aim to have such a beautiful eye for writing what things look like and creating images for people to see as they read. Beautiful book, 10/10 would recommend!!
• 
  Joel

  An indispensable and varied glimpse into the mind and talent of Duncan, whose ability to engage in the reader never wavers. While not as triumphant as his novels, River Teeth is an earnest and quirky sojourn into that which draws us into his larger works.
• 
  Daniel

  For The Garbage Man's Daughter. The first piece of short fiction to move me to tears.
• 
  Rachel King

  I loved "Rose Vegetables."
• 
  Ann Zweber

  A diverse array of stories, but all rich with Duncan's amazing writing. I wish he would write more!
• 
  Linda Gaines

  A series of stories and essays by this great writer. One about the life and death of his brother( and Mickey Mantle) is remarkable.