The Remains of River Names

Matt Briggs’s novel, The Remains of River Names, opens with Artie and Janice Graham, former hippies, fleeing as the police close in on their marijuana farm. They show little remorse at leaving their two school-aged sons behind to fend for themselves. These former flower children possess no ideals or purpose and live for the moment through the fifteen-year span of the novel, while their children, trapped in a cycle of selfishness, become isolated and antisocial. Briggs demonstrates that life attains meaning when one makes a conscious effort to give of oneself. Powerful in its images, Faulknerian in structure and tone, Briggs’ foreboding portrait of contemporary society is challenging and effective.

Critic Ann Powers wrote in the The New York Times Book Review, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.”

Briggs exhibits an impressive gift for conveying dark situations and murky motives with illuminating clarity. His mutlivalenced prose frequently spotlights his characters’ befuddled, soulful searches for greater meaning, capturing the atmosphere of ambivalence, despair, and stifled hope.

– Publishers Weekly

Briggs characters are achingly fine, wringing empathy and exasperation at every blundering turn. – Booklist

An auspicious debut volume for 29-year-old Matt Briggs, whose sharp-eyed yet sympathetic vision of life in the overgrown, semi-rural backwaters of the Pacific Northwest puts him somewhere on the spectrum that leads from Raymond Carver to Kurt Cobain. His style is certainly terse and declarative in the now-familiar Carver tradition. But his characters are often startlingly self-aware, and even in their dead-end desperation they remain alive to the remarkable landscapes, both fecund and desolate, that surround them. – Andrew O’Hehir, Salon