Eddies Along the River — Michael Sullivan

Eddies Along the River is a fanciful memoir of growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota during the turbulent 1950's, 60's and 70's. The mighty Mississippi is the river of the title, and its flow stands for the advance of time. Near its source, the river has many moods and faces. As it makes its way through St. Paul, its burdens are carried south to its destination. Similarly, the protagonists of the stories must bend and struggle in their many guises, but the collective thrust of the stories' narrative flow is clear: the young man variously portrayed is beset with growing pains. The stories are organized into groups: Early Trials, Surviving Education, Hitchhiking Stories, Aidan's Stories, and Afterlife. In the stories, the protagonist has many names. Like the old saying, the more some things are changed, the more some things remain the same. The consistent subject of these explorations is a heterosexual male of mid-twentieth century America, born and raised in the Midwest. He is a socially inept loner. As he enters adolescence, his problems adapting to life multiply. He is an individual, to be sure, but also a case in point. Some tales, such as Sanctuary are in first person, enabling the author to get the distance of a fictional person, while unlocking the emotions lying in his memory. As far as any factual history is concerned, the author has taken considerable fictional liberties. He paints a picture of his journey growing up as a young boy. The boy is not extraordinary, but his life is unique. This book offers portraits in specific times and settings and like any artist might do, each portrait is colored differently with different lighting and reveals different facets of the subject. The boy's time in grade school began in the 1950's and he finished high school in the 1960's. The later stories conclude sometime in the 1970's. Each generation, every era, has its challenges. There is often a male protagonist in each story that can be identified as the author's voice. A fictional memoir does not tell the whole story of a life, rather it concentrates on specific moments in time. In the case of this mode of writing, it is an account of incidents in time but may include fictive elements.