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57 pages 1 hour read

Shelley Read

Go as a River: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5: “1970-1971”

Part 5, Chapter 22 Summary

Victoria reels from the shock of reading Inga’s letter, which has revealed Lukas’s life but also his disappearance. She thinks of her son as a young man, facing the violence of war and the uncertainty of his identity. She focuses on the monument of rocks she has built in the clearing where she left him. This monument has also brought them back together, if indirectly, and she imagines Inga and Lukas’s own visits to the stones through time. She is overwhelmed by Inga’s call for help and is unsure how to respond, so she meditates in the presence of the rocks for guidance.

Part 5, Chapter 23 Summary

Victoria invites Zelda over with the intention of finally revealing the story of her and Wil and Lukas for the first time. They walk through the peach farm, and Victoria confides in Zelda about her relationship with Wil, his murder, and her pregnancy and abandonment of Lukas. Zelda is shocked that Victoria never looked for Wil’s family or searched for her son in the intervening years. Victoria feels unready to face Lukas, but Zelda encourages her, believing that they must seek him out. Victoria shares the contents of Inga’s note. Zelda reminds Victoria to be brave and offers to help her whenever she is ready to search for Lukas.

Victoria then heads to the mountains to consider her course of action. She takes strength from the support of the land, and the perseverance of life despite its many difficulties. She decides to search for Lukas, hoping that “he would find a place in his own frightened heart to give me the chance to love him” (290). 

Part 5, Chapter 24 Summary

Zelda and Victoria travel to Durango to visit Inga. On the way, they pass the Animus River, and Victoria wonders if Lukas shares her connection to landscape. She stops by the river and walks into it, imagining Lukas in the same water.

When Inga opens the door, she immediately holds Victoria’s hands, and Victoria feels that they are connected through their shared love of Lukas. Inga apologizes to Victoria for not reaching out sooner, and for revealing the truth of his parentage in a way that caused him to run.

Part 5, Chapter 25 Summary

Victoria explores Inga’s house, imagining scenes from Lukas’s childhood. She thinks about the consequences of her actions on the other family’s lives. Inga shares photographs of Lukas growing up, and Victoria realizes that Lukas looks just like Wil. She realizes that he must have faced bigotry due to his skin color, which Inga tells her “darkened as he aged” (297). Victoria’s motherly instinct to protect Lukas flares as she looks at the photos, though she does not know whether she can help him. Inga reassures her that the truth is what Lukas needs, so that he can make up his own mind and decide what to do with it. She says that she will reach out to Lukas to set up a meeting.

Part 5, Chapter 26 Summary: “1971”

Victoria stands along the ridge of the Blue Mesa Reservoir with Inga and Zelda, waiting to meet Lukas for the first time. They are near the hut where he was born. Victoria is nervous and fiddles with the peach blossoms that she picked from her farm to bring as a gift. She is afraid that Lukas will be angry or disappointed when she reveals her story to him.

When Lukas pulls up and gets out of the car, Victoria feels like it is Wil stepping out because Lukas is so similar in looks to his father. When he smiles, she realizes his unique qualities that have developed from his experience as a soldier and as a lonely man in search of his identity. She also recognizes part of him that she remembers from his birth. They walk toward each other along the ridge.

Part 5 Analysis

Victoria’s quest to regain a connection with her son reveals new facets of the theme of Displacement, Relocation, and Place Identity, for whenever she is faced with hardship, she returns to her connection with the landscape, using the earth itself to guide her forward. Even as she reels from the news of Lukas’s life story as laid out in Inga’s letter, she asks the stones for answers. As her narrative states, “At the jagged boulder, I laid both of my unsteady palms upon the circle, hoping the years of longing contained in each carefully placed stone would guide me in what I should do next” (278). The pain of Lukas’s displacement along with her own losses feels like too much pain to bear, and she momentarily considers pulling back and hiding her grief rather than moving through it. The narrative uses natural imagery to capture this instinct to freeze in time, for Victoria expresses the desire to “take it all back, tuck [her] story deep into the solid earth where it had rested like a fossil all these years” (285). However, her instinct to bury pain conflicts with Wil’s wisdom to “go as a river,” and she is pulled by her own curiosity to know her son. She considers the possibility of their shared connection to the natural landscape despite their separation, and she ultimately decides to share the gift of the land’s bounty with her son, in the hopes that he will want to share it with her.

Victoria’s decision to reunite with Lukas in a place surrounded by natural beauty allows her to reveal the secret that she has kept for the entirety of her life, and in sharing her grief, she becomes less isolated from others. By revealing to Zelda the details of Wil’s death and her traumatic abandonment of Lukas, she rekindles her feelings of love, and this shift in perspective compels her to connect with Lukas. Her ability to convey the positive aspects of her past romance become apparent when she feels a thrill while sharing her love story, for she confesses that simply saying Wil’s name “reminded [her] that the exhilarating rush of first love was still very much in [her] veins” (281). A collective sense of Female Identity and Motherhood is also forged when she and Zelda visit Inga, for the two women immediately embrace, connected by their shared love for Lukas. When Victoria explores her son’s adoptive family home, she realizes the ways in which their lives are connected, and this section of the novel emphasizes that although Victoria’s grief has kept her close to the past and to Wil, the final stage of her journey through her grief is not taken alone. When she goes to meet Lukas on the ridge, she is accompanied by two others, Zelda and Inga, who take the next step of her journey alongside her.

The novel thus concludes with Victoria’s brave decision to take this second chance at motherhood and meet her son, and this resolution conveys the courage required to move forward while carrying the burden of such a painful past. Immediately following Lukas’s birth, Victoria had to make difficult choices to ensure their survival, and now, to help her adult son, she must once again overcome her fear of making the wrong decision and move forward despite her qualms about the potential consequences of her actions. This gnawing anxiety is aptly articulated by her rhetorical question, “What if learning of his parents’ forbidden love and Wil’s brutal death proved far worse for Lukas than his not knowing?” (298). Her dilemma highlights the challenge of mothers everywhere as they struggle to choose how best to protect their children. Her decision to reveal the full truth despite her fears ultimately honors Wil’s wisdom to “go as a river,” and Victoria ultimately comes to understand this expression as a way of carrying the knowledge and lessons of the past forward to the future. This philosophical outlook is depicted through the motif of the river itself, for as Victoria states, “this journey I have called my life […] continu[es] to flow with all it has gathered because it knows no other way” (301). The hope of the reunion is symbolized through the peach blossom branch that Victoria brings for Lukas, signifying renewal and strength. This hopeful mood implies their renewed connection, even if the author cuts the novel short before mother and son actually meet face to face, thereby leaving the nature of their reunion up to the imagination.

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