Hypertext asked Barbara Monier, author of Pushing The River, “What kinds of thoughts or questions do you hope your novel Pushing the River will provoke?”
Each of the characters in Pushing the River exhibit quirky complexity, even the minor ones. Each person is flawed, and some are profoundly damaged by life; yet each character also has moments of true grace within the course of the novel. Most even have moments of genuine – if quiet – heroism. The novel attempts to view a troubled and troubling situation (a family crisis engendered by a teen pregnancy) through a lens of compassion. There is humor, some lustful sex, egregious errors of judgment, situations that strain credulity. This mirrors the way I see life – as a joyful and disturbing mess. But I also believe in the transformative power of plumbing the depths, and I wanted to challenge readers to do two things: first, to look more deeply into the undercurrents that run beneath the surface of very human foibles and situations. This novel considers the psychological depths of a family across generations, and thereby creates a doorway to comprehend events more fully. The second challenge was to use this deeper understanding to shake things up — our previous habits of perception — and to expand our views.
Pushing the River incorporates a number of ongoing themes about women – both in terms of women individually and their relationships between and among one another. There are a number of scenes where a woman looks into a mirror, regarding and reflecting on her own image; and these scenes carry a thread of women’s complicated feelings about our own appearance, our bodies, and how these feelings become incorporated into our “presentation” as well as our sexuality. The book attempts to show some of the ways in which women pass information to one another – and often, in Pushing the River, we see the information passing from one generation to the next, in the form of spoken words as well as unspoken behaviors and thoughts. So, I certainly hoped the book would engender a lot of reflection on women’s views of ourselves, and how much of this has been handed down to us from prior generations as well as filtered through us to younger generations in our care.
An early reviewer found the novel “filled with every-day existentialism,” and I could not have been happier with this response. If we understand existentialism to presume an unfathomable universe in which “the individual must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad” (Merriam-Webster), then this reviewer would suggest that I have achieved my goal in writing this book. I want readers to consider the balancing act that love demands of us, the weighing of conflicting factors, the muddle of attempting to do our best.
Barbara Monier has been writing since the earliest days when she composed in crayon on paper with extremely wide lines. She studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. It was the highest prize awarded that year, and the first in Michigan’s history for a piece written directly for the screen. She has three completed novels, You, In Your Green Shirt and A Little Birdie Told Me (published and available on Amazon) as well as Pushing the River.
Preorder Pushing the River HERE.