I didn't know when I picked up By a Slow River that I would be reading a second consecutive unresolved mystery novel, but here we are. And now that we are here, it's a little hard not to compare. (Also, while we are here, let me say that The Infatuations is the perfect unresolved mystery.) In To Each His Own, the reader is left understanding what has happened, even as the mystery remains unresolved in the book. In By a Slow River, both reader and narrator are left uncertain. (The same is true for The Infatuations, but the feeling that book left me with was quite different.) It feels a bit strange to say, but the mechanism that creates the uncertainty is a little too neat. Where To Each His Own jolts the reader to a comprehension, By a Slow River does almost the opposite -- jolting the reader from mild uncertainty to puzzled doubt.
The way By a Slow River unfolds is very beautiful. The narrator, toward the beginning, is fairly anonymous -- almost an omniscient storyteller. In fact, it takes quite some time reading the book before you even know who he is. But as the book goes on, he inserts himself more and more into the narrative and his own story becomes a subject alongside what seemed to be the central events of the book. At first, you think him just a witness, but by the end you understand he is a player.
