Bright River Trilogy (1984) by Annie Green

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Bright River Trilogy (1984)

by Annie Green

Hooke's Crossing, Maryland

Maryland: 3/9

    Bright River Trilogy is as obscure as it gets- a one-off author, published in the 1980's to no acclaim, and author Annie Green vanished from the public sphere without a trace.   It's also not a trilogy in the sense that it is one novel, under three hundred pages long.  The "trilogy" refers to the trio of main characters who live in the middle-of-nowhere, Maryland.  I didn't even know there were rural parts of Maryland for most of my life.  I had some idea that somewhere, Maryland had generated a "southern" culture with plantations and such, but I feel like they hush it up.

  Bright River Trilogy is not set on one of these erstwhile plantations, rather it's a small town filled with characters who- yes- you guessed it- never go anywhere.  In this way this book reminds me of several novels from upstate New York and rural New England- sad characters, often from a once well-off, now decadent/failed wealthy family of the area, slouching towards their eventual extinction.  Here you've got the well-meaning grandma whose stern husband hung himself after being implicated in a real estate fraud, the prodigal son, who goes off to Vietnam and returns with a wife who he literally picked up at the Port Authority bus station (and is an alcoholic).  Other protagonists include the whorish daughter of a local yokel- she's got a book with the 50 dudes she's banged.  Her dad spends his days reading the "M" volume of an encyclopedia to her deaf, drug-addled younger brother. 

  Besides the M volume, nobody in this tale picks up a book or appears to have any interests what so ever besides self-destruction.  You'd be forgiven if you thought this book was published last year as part of the "deaths of despair" trend, but you'd be wrong- 1984!