The Remains of River Names

The countercultural excesses of the 1960s and 1970s cast a long shadow on the family at the heart of Briggs's keenly intuitive debut effort--a collection of 11 linked stories--in which narrators alternate between four members of a doomed and unnamed family. As the book opens in the early 1980s, middle-schooler Milton and grade-schooler Dillon have just been ditched by their parents, Art and Janice, who fled their Seattle-area house when the police closed in on Art's pot-growing operation. Mom and Dad eventually return, but their misadventures repeatedly throw the family into chaos just as the two boys enter adolescence. Art serves jail time, Janice takes the kids and leaves him, then lives with a succession of boyfriends and finally kicks Milton out at age 16. Desperate for some form of stability, Milton pursues exercise and violence, growing into a powerful weight-lifter and a would-be rapist, while little brother Dillon becomes bookish and defiant. Sweetly, and unexpectedly, the adult brothers cling to each other with a bond forged from their dysfunctional childhood--but one senses that nothing can really save them, not even romantic love, which Milton finds in a bar and Dillon finds in a waitress like his mother. The book's bleak outlook is reflected in its title, which stems from one of Janice's friends, Joe, who tells Dillon that nothing has value but ""the old names of places... they are the only spoken thing that is not a lie."" Briggs exhibits an impressive gift for conveying dark situations and murky motives with illuminating clarity. His multivalenced prose frequently spotlights his characters' befuddled, soulful searches for greater meaning, capturing the atmosphere of ambivalence, despair and stifled hope around a family painfully unraveling as two boys roughly, uncertainly, become men. (Oct.)