Dark doings on the Mississippi

“THE River Wife,” a novel by Jonis Agee (“Sweet Eyes” and “Strange Angels”), is set on the shores of the Mississippi and ranges from the early 1800s into the years of the Great Depression. Filled with high Southern gothic flavor, the narrative is epic in scope, covering a series of generations and bursting with entwined layers of plot tension, sex, violence and intrigue.

The tale opens during the Depression with Hedie Rails, who, as the pregnant teenage bride of Clement Ducharme, comes to his opulent estate, Jacques’ Landing, having been thrown out of her family’s home. Left alone night after night as her husband ventures into the world to do some kind of mysterious “work” -- bootlegging, she suspects -- Hedie happens upon the journals of a woman, Annie Lark, dating back to the early 1800s. Through Hedie’s reading, we encounter a series of ill-fated “river wives” who have inhabited this land.

Of the four river wives, Annie Lark has the most compelling story, probably because she’s the most fully realized character. A teenager when the devastating earthquake of 1811 hits, she is pinned beneath the house’s support beam, which has fallen and crushed her legs. The members of her family, in a desperate bid to save their own lives, leave her to die. It is then that Jacques Ducharme, a French fur trapper, happens upon Annie. He saves her, nurses her back to health and falls in love with her.

Some of the best scenes occur early in the narrative, focused on Annie and the hardscrabble life she builds with Jacques before he becomes successful. Crippled by her injuries, she’s unable to help him trap, but she puts her mind to learning the art of skinning. Working on a rabbit to practice, she studies the newly skinned creature. “From the neck down, the body lay tender red as one of mother’s lost babies, back curved and legs curled into its body. Despite her poor work, she could make out the muscles of the powerful hind legs and back and again felt that awful wonder.” Annie takes an interest in learning how animals are constructed, studying carcasses and skeletons, as her hunger to know more about the greater world is ignited.

Jacques and Annie found the community of Jacques’ Landing, planning to offer an inn for travelers on the Mississippi. But an insidious desire for wealth takes hold of Jacques, and he becomes a river pirate, plundering booty by night and running the inn by day, keeping Annie in the dark about the source of his growing wealth. (Along the way, Annie befriends the historical figure John James Audubon, the naturalist and painter who cataloged the birds of North America, and he helps with her mission of self-education -- a plot point that is fascinating but pushed aside in favor of more dynamic action.)

After Annie’s entry ends in tragedy, the story continues through the eyes of the other women in Jacques’ life but with less emotional detail, lacking richness of character. There’s Omah, a freed slave who becomes Jacques’ fellow pirate, luring river vessels and their crews to untimely ends while garnering untold riches; then Laura, an Irish lass and Jacques’ second wife, who swoons over Jacques’ fortune more than the man himself; and, finally, Maddie, Laura and Jacques’ daughter, who, readers learn, is the mother of Clement Ducharme, Hedie’s husband, thus completing the lineage.

Hedie, readers come to see, has joined the sorority of river wives and may have no choice but to follow the disastrous trajectories of those who preceded her. Like the others, she finds herself cursed to love a man whose greed exceeds reasonable limits, whose appetite for danger knows no bounds and whose love for her may be insufficient to save them from calamity.

The writing throughout is lush, as the author examines the addictive allure of risk, along with the blessings and curses of family ties, especially those formed by marriage.

Ultimately, though, the story is less focused on an examination of human foibles and the traits we share than it is on getting us to turn the pages, tempting us to overlook niggling questions about the characters’ motivation so long as the story keeps unfolding.

Jacques, around whom much of the action takes place, remains a cipher. How he changes from a seemingly satisfied fur trapper smitten with his wife into a violent river pirate whose avarice imperils and eventually destroys his family is never made clear. Nor is the specific source of the curse that taints the river wives. A number of characters are stubbornly flat even as the landscape teems with vibrancy. Still, if we allow ourselves to become fully enmeshed in the plot, we won’t snag ourselves on these details.

The problem is that, once the book is put down, the experience of having entered that world becomes ephemeral. Without a voice like Annie Lark’s to see us through the entire narrative, our attention strays, and once we return to our daily lives, there’s not much that lingers on.

Bernadette Murphy is author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting” and coauthor of “The Tao Gals’ Guide to Real Estate.”