57 pages • 1 hour read
Shelley ReadGo as a River: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Peaches
The Nash family’s “miracle” peaches represent Victoria’s livelihood and family legacy, thereby symbolizing resilience. Victoria is a third-generation farmer; her grandfather, Hollis Henry Nash, starts the first and only peach farm in the Gunnison area, passing down the family secrets of growing peaches in a cold climate from generation to generation. The peaches are unique because of the unusually cold climate in the fall, for “the cold nights and warm days of early autumn on Colorado’s western slope […] sweetens the fruit sugar” (63). The biological fragility of the peaches signifies the precious nature of life, which persists even amidst harsh and dangerous conditions. The lush sensory descriptions of the peaches emphasize the universal delight of living. For Victoria, the delight of life is her love for Wil, and the imagery of peaches is mingled suggestively with the sensual image of kissing, for Victoria describes “how he’d watched me bite into a fat peach, juice dripping down my forearm and off my bare elbow; how my mouth glistened, as if inviting him to press his lips against mine” (64).
In addition to her pleasures, Victoria’s losses are also conveyed through the imagery of the peaches. For example, she views the despair of the car accident that suddenly killed her mother, aunt, and cousin as the harsh pulling of unripened fruit, stating, “God will pluck your mother, your cousin, your aunt from this earth like peaches pulled from the branch too soon” (51). The extended metaphor of peach harvesting is also used to explore her loss of control in the wake of her grief, and the push to move forward despite loss. As the narrative states, “In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given” (13). Despite tragedy, Victoria is resilient, and this trait is also signified by the toughness of her family's peach trees, which thrive even after being transplanted from Iola to Paonia. Her hopes for her child’s future are likewise affirmed when Inga leaves her a ripe peach on the boulder where she finds Lukas: a wordless promise to care for the child, who is likewise fragile and precious. When Victoria goes to meet Lukas for the first time, she carries a peach blossom branch like an offering of the relationship that she hopes will also blossom with him. The petals also serve as a symbol of his family connection to the land.
Rivers
The motif of the river is linked to Victoria’s character development as she moves through tragedy and comes to fully understand the wisdom inherent in Wil’s determination to “go as a river” (91). The physical damming of the Gunnison River, which is the river of Victoria’s origins and the landscape of her youth, brings her pain but also offers her a chance to move forward. Caught between the tragedy of Wil’s death and the hope for a future with Lukas, her feelings for the Gunnison and the events that transpire in Iola are conflicted. As she states, they are made up of “equal parts love and anguish for its winding path, and awe that it had followed me here” (191). At first, Victoria’s willpower propels her forward through tragedy, as when her mother died. Thus, she initially sees the river as a force that pushes through obstacles, but as she ages, she comes to realize that the river carries sediment along with its flow, and she begins to view it as a carrier of history, a sentient entity that is capable of having an “ancient conversation.” At the pivotal moment when she decides to reach out to Lukas, she symbolically gathers up two fistfuls of earth that represent the memories and the wisdom she carries with her after a lifetime of experience. She reflects on her adult understanding of Wil’s sentiment, realizing, “[L]ike the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil […] and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself” (290). In this moment, she finally understands Wil’s message, and it leads her to a reunion with their son and a hope for healing and closure from Grief as a Journey.
Maps and Places
The novel uses the motif of maps and places to develop the characters’ identities and their various relationships to the “landscapes of their youth” (4). When Victoria first meets Wil, their relationship is described using map imagery, for the narrative characterizes their lives as paths that intersect “as sure as North Laura and Main” (9), and this depiction of fate as an inevitable map routes emphasizes the clash of their identities and the romanticized “star-crossed” trope of their love. This fateful description also foreshadows the tragedy of their union, implying that all events connected with their relationship are somehow predestined. The impact of Wil’s love on Victoria’s life is extended through the metaphor of maps, for she reflects afterward, “I could not yet identify what new map had unfolded within me, but I knew I was returning home uncommon” (19), and this statement reveals that she is on a path that will separate her from all she has previously known. For Victoria, love is a “mysterious territory” that takes her, both literally and inside herself, to new places.
The motif of maps and places is also used to convey the pain of dislocation and the impacts of the flooding on Iola on its people. The author crafts the prologue in a way that emphasizes the irreplaceable loss and disruption to people’s families and lives, using direct address to increase the impact of her words: “Imagine a town silent, forgotten, decomposing at the bottom of a lake that once was a river. If this makes you wonder whether the joys and pain of a place wash away as the floodwaters rise and swallow, I can tell you they do not” (4). The straightforward, serious tone of these statements intensifies the feeling of grief that imbues the disappearance of the town and the displacement of its people. In the moment when Victoria sees the newspaper story announcing the start of Iola’s inundation, she feels fear and despair even though she has long since relocated. The influence of people’s childhood homes on their identity becomes apparent as Victoria highlights a cumulative list of the destruction involved, stating, “But it wasn’t until that moment I’d truly believed that towns could actually be erased from the map, from their own land, that people could be forced out, their homes and livelihoods burned and drowned” (218). The symbolic erasure of an entire place from a map evokes fear, for a map is often viewed as an unchanging and dependable account of a landscape.
