THE RIVER TO PICKLE BEACH

by Doris Betts ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 28, 1972

Pickle Beach is on the North Carolina coast and the river is perhaps that long, slow stretch between life and death although Doris Betts' new novel is freer of the symbolism of her earlier works. Still one cannot overlook the manifest parallelism -- the sickness of America as reflected in this country at this time (the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) and again in one of the three characters here. But mostly this is about Bebe Sellars -- married 18 years, childless, a great visualizer particularly in terms of old films and film stars, and generally content in her marriage to Jack. He was a gardener and is a quite self-educated man, gentle and devoted, who now has come to Pickle Beach as a caretaker of some summer cabins. But then there's Mickey McCane, one of those very male men whose macho conceals a rankling impotence and latent violence predictably released at the close with the arrival of a mongoloid mother and child. Ms. Betts writes well, with a sense of what is both real and valid and sometimes depressingly prosaic in the life and lives she has chosen to limn so that it's hard to say why this does not altogether succeed. Perhaps because of a certain slackness and shapelessness.

Pub Date: April 28, 1972

ISBN: 0684818604

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972

Categories: FICTION