Richmond Shreve. Lost River Anthology (Rites of Passage). Cape May, New Jersey: Cape Island Press, 2009. 146 pages.
This is new ground for me: the first person I’ve had in a workshop or class who’s published a book. Richmond Shreve was in my creative non-fiction workshop a few years ago at the Winter Getaway, and I got to see a few of these pieces in process. It definitely provides a different outlook for reviewing the book.
Lost River Anthology is a collection of short stories that Shreve has written over the past nine years. They aren’t related, but do share some themes: reckless youth, the wisdom and perspective gained by getting older, the beauty of nature. The stories are fiction in the sense that the characters and situations have been altered or invented, but they certainly speak to deeper emotional truths that Shreve has learned.
This collection is series of thoughtful meditations that, when read together, speak to each other in surprising ways. Shreve is a writer who’s not afraid to explore the frailties and insecurities that make characters complex, or the beauty that’s often hidden in the world around us.
Some of the stories, like “Slammin’ Leap,” “Love’s Ghosts,” and “Getting Lucky,” are about young characters, viewed through a sometimes-wistful, often wiser lens. Others, like “Fire Truck Man” and “What Do I Know,” are about older characters coming to grips with changing worlds.
My favorite is “The Junket,” which is also the longest and, to my eyes, best-developed piece in the collection. It’s about a young man who flies out to Las Vegas with his fiancees father on a gambling junket. Here, Shreve recreates the Las Vegas of the 1970s with many small details and asides that make the piece real. We see that, with enough money to gamble, a man can be a king in Las Vegas…but we also see that wearing the crown has a price.