A River Barge's Poets and Prophets"
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 14, 1992
Reviewed by Karen Rile

Like her previous novels, Walking After Midnight and Summertime, Maureen McCoy's third novel is set along the banks of the upper Mississippi, and like the others, Divining Blood is charged both with a sense of place and quirky, pure-hearted humor.

Magdalena Mary Walsh, called Delana Mae, is a 24-year-old river driver, an anomaly in the early 1970s. Yet in the seven years since she's run away from her comfortable childhood home in Illinois to board a river barge as the hired cook, the male crew of the Pat Furey has surrendered to this diminutive, headstrong young woman with their confidence and respect. When the novel opens Delana is piloting her last voyage upriver from New Orleans—she's retiring, due to the recent birth of her daughter, Robin. Accompanying her on the long ride home are the baby's father, Johnny, and a boatload of land-shy river men.

The story of Delana's childhood on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, the accidental drowning at age 4 of her middle sister, Sally, which precipitated Delana's birth, her flight from her family as a teenager following a disturbing sexual encounter with her surgeon father and her itinerant life with Johnny on the river unfold at an unhurried pace.

McCoy's voice is distinctly American, though unique. (Nowhere do people actually talk like this, omitting articles and prepositions and condensing sentences in the interest of poetic cadence.) As in her earlier works, the narrative drifts forward in a lyrical current of hypnotic, hyper-realistic imagery that insulates the reader from an otherwise slapstick plot and makes the convoluted syntax spouting from the mouths of her characters seem more charming than peculiar.

During the course of the novel, Delana shoves her common-law husband off the upper deck of their barge, nearly killing him, lobs several dozen raw eggs around her stepmother's kitchen in a fit of postpartum hysteria and later dredges herself and her newborn daughter in a private, muddy-water baptism.Her behavior is generally self-indulgent and often irresponsible. And yet her unwavering moral integrity and her capacity for self-examination and forgiveness make her attractive.

Equally appealing is Marcia, Delana's surviving sister and confidante, a Pentecostal Catholic whose fervent desire to speak in tongues eclipses the guilt she feels over her infatuation with her religious mentor, a maverick priest called Father Dan. By the novel's finish, Marcia has found an unorthodox but satisfying channel to spiritual ecstasy, just as Delana has come to peace with her past, made a decision about her future with Johnny and carved out a place for herself and her small daughter on the banks of the mighty river.

McCoy is a specialist at hopeful endings, which, thanks to her nimble wit and spectacular use of metaphor, she pulls off without sentimentality. Her characters are genuine yet abstracted, aware yet innocent. They seem to operate purely on instinct, speaking truths they barely comprehend, like a bevy of split-brained prophets. They are constantly stumbling toward the light.

Divining Blood finishes high on metaphor, in an orange-and-black cloud of monarch butterflies, an image that would suffocate a lesser novel, but McCoy is a daring and competent writer and she wrangles it all into her control.



"A Lyrical Tale of the River is Piloted by Language—Not Plot."
Los Angeles Times, Friday, May 22, 1992, Reviewed by Chris Goodrich

In a novel so lyrical and poetic as Maureen McCoy's Divining Blood, it's difficult to single out one event as the novel's turning point, the moment at which all that has gone before suddenly comes into focus. The closest thing, however, may be the scene during a casual summer party in which Johnny Melody, the shy Mississippi riverboat engineer, is beaten at a simple pea-and-shell game by his host, Dr. Skylar Walsh.

Johnny sees again that Delana, his lover and Walsh's daughter, is "that pea", and, in shaking Walsh's hand in congratulations, feels compelled to break a few of his fingers. "The bones snapped so wonderfully loud," think Johnny's shipmates, already uncomfortable at being so long on land, "maybe doctors' bones break especially hard. The healer's hands had not given up easily to humility."

The tugboat Pat Furey has docked at Delana's hometown near St. Louis to drop her off, the birth of Delana and Johnny's child, Robin, having brought her seven years on the water to an end.

And what a time it has been. Delana—short for Magdalena—came to the tug as a 17-year-old runaway, beginning as a cook but leaving a full-fledged pilot.

Cheramie, the captain of the Pat Furey, is sorry to see her go, for she's got, he says, "a pilot's eye," an eye allowing Delana, and apparently only Delana, to win at her father's shell game. Walsh replies, of course, that Delana's skill is in her blood. "She got it from me. I taught her," he says, attempting to claim an influrence he lost long ago—years before Johnny's appearance, back when he abandoned Delana's mother, Dovie, for a nurse.

This exchange between father and captain makes clear that Divining Blood is elaboration upon a familiar saying—that blood is thicker than water.

McCoy, author of the novels Summertime and Walking After Midnight doesn't assess the saying's accuracy. True, Johnny goes back to the tug alone, but that's because Delana has laughed off his frequent proposals of marriage;she chooses to remain on land, staying home with her child and childhood family (what remains of it, Dovie having died and Walsh having married the nurse, Joy.)

She does so, it seems, to address—and dress—old wounds largely derived from her parents' troubled marriage: Delana was its last gasp, conceived when Walsh returned to Dovie temporarily a few weeks after their other child drowned in the Mississippi. Delana, as a result, has considered herself a living accident, a replacement, always drawn to the river that indirectly brought her into being…and equally indirectly, Robin. With Robin's birth, and finally her baptism on the water, a circle has been brought to a close.

It's an unusual, agreeable story, but Divining Blood is carried by language more than plot. McCoy is an eminently quotable writer. She describes a clearing as being "where the first spring violets always look terribly polite amid the layers of old leaf"; nature as having "a hostess heart: the minute you are out of sight its mild sympathy deserts you;" Dovie as sending gifts of candy because "Her cooled love let sugar speak for hope."

And here's Delana leaving Robin on the banks of the Mississippi before taking one last, commemorative swim in the great river: "The bright sun on bare skin seemed like a pact in favor of intensity. Dull feeling would be a sin, always, the true sin. Let eyes and skin burn. Let the mind flame on."

McCoy's inventive, dreamy prose has a downside, however, for sometimes it's mannered or simply unclear. Dovie tells Walsh, angrily, "Your voice is a sausage. It holds in the guts of your lies": the picking of apples with a cup-bearing pole becomes "the caging of fruit" which "seemed a terrible, wounding act."

One can tease out, eventually, the meaning or import of those and similar expressions, but it's frustrating to be tripped up by them every page or two, especially when McCoy's prose is generally so good. Rich writing, like rich desserts, are best in small portions."


Entertainment Weekly, July 24, 1992 Reviewed by Jeff Giles
Strife on the Mississippi. Delana Mae Walsh, a prodigal daughter, returns home after spending seven years working on a river barge. Her homecoming dredges up all sorts of unusual family secrets and sorrows. McCoy tackles outsize themes, but in individual scenes she also proves herself a superb miniaturist. At times her prose is sluggish and overwrought, but elsewhere it can be wonderfully evocative. Divining Blood is an old-fashioned novel that wonders aloud whether blood really is thicker than water. A-