Rating: 
Summary: the last truly male work admitted to the canon
Review: Ed, Lewis, Bobby & Drew are Georgia suburbanites in search of adventure, so they decide to canoe down the wild Cahulawasee River before it is dammed up forever. The boys, as most everyone knows from the terrific movie, soon stumble upon more adventure than they had anticipated and find themselves at war with several denizens of the backwoods country. These four men are forced to confront the central question at the core of the male being: how would I react if I was confronted by physical danger and heroism was required. Ed, the narrator and hero of the book, finds upon returning home that his entire life has improved. By performing well during the crisis, he has built up a personal reservoir of confidence that he continues to draw upon. Contrast Ed with the men of the Clinton/Gingrich generation. Their general avoidance of service in Viet Nam has resulted in a twisting of their souls. Given the opportunity to answer the central question about themselves, they ducked. In a phrase coined by C.S. Lewis, they are "men without chests". Hollow at their cores, they have no proven personal strength to draw upon and collapse inwards upon themselves. This is a great book and perhaps one of the last truly male works of literature that will be admitted to the canon. GRADE: A+
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Summary: For adventure, you can't do much better than this...
Review: James Dickey's "Deliverance" is a study of how a civilized, peaceful, law-abiding man chooses a "kill or be killed" mentality when he is trapped in a life-or-death situation by an unforeseeable danger. The novel opens with four middle-aged white-collar men from Atlanta planning a weekend canoe trip down a river in northeastern Georgia. Lewis Medlock is the experienced outdoorsman and adventurer of the group; he seeks to conquer the wilderness and boasts of the injuries he's received and hardships he's overcome in his fishing and hunting excursions. Ed Gentry, the narrator, a graphic design consultant by profession, is an avid archer but does not quite share Lewis's love of the outdoors. Accompanying them are the sensible Drew, a sales executive for a soft drink company, and Bobby, indecisive, emasculated, and almost completely out of his element. The river flows through rocky, mountainous terrain, one of those areas in which all the human inhabitants are presumably related to each other. Some of the locals try to discourage the men from tackling the river with canoes, but Lewis is resolute, and they set off down the river as planned. The trip goes smoothly the first day, but the next day, Ed and Bobby run into trouble -- a terrifying encounter with two murderous, animalistic backwoods goons. Lewis and Drew arrive in time to save Ed's and Bobby's lives, but not without a price. When the four men try to escape down the river, Lewis, the strongest and best hunter among them, breaks his leg in a passage through some vicious rapids. Trapped in a gorge and stalked by a vengeful assailant, the men must rely on Ed to save their lives. "Deliverance" could be a simple tale of revenge and bravado, but what separates it from generic adventure stories is the sheer descriptive power of Dickey's writing. He evokes the refreshing water spray and stunning scenery of the ride down the river, the violence of crashing against rocks through rapids, the feel of a tense bowstring in the hand of a man who is fighting for his life, and the struggle of Ed's desperate white-knuckled climb up the treacherous cliff face to escape the gorge. "Deliverance" shows that great literature and harrowing adventure are not mutually exclusive.
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Summary: Like the movie? You'll love the book.
Review: As good as "Deliverance" the movie is, the book is even better. It goes into more detail about the motivations that led each character to the fateful canoe excursion. Unfortunately, I read it after having seen the movie numerous times, so I kept picturing Bert Reynolds, John Voight, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox in my mind. Author Dickey is a great storyteller at the top of his game. That the novel also conatins a greater social significance is also a given. Mostly though, it is a fine exploration of the modern American male and how dealing with his testosterone urges can get him into trouble.
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Summary: Squeal like a pig, boy!
Review: "Deliverance" is as tough, gritty, and eloquent as any of Dickey's poems. In this novel, Dickey displays his talents as an observer, and as a story teller. Despite the macho, outdoor aesthetic that permeates much of the book, there is a surprising degree of psychology and subtlety involved. The pace of "Deliverance" reminds me of some of Kubrik's finer films (2001, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket). As in many of Kubrik's works, "Deliverance" begins with a slow buildup which takes place in a normal environment. This buid up not only creates the tension for the action to follow, but also paves its psychological foundation. In the beginning of "Deliverance" we sense many things about it's mundane protagonist--an ordinary man who is inadvertantly called upon to perform under extaordinary circumstances. Ed Gentry is a typical office worker, family man, and friend. But in a few critical scenes such as the one in which he makes love to his wife but imagines the tiger like eyes of a model he is attracted to, we sense something different. The moment of sexual fantasy--a normal component of much marital sex--evokes a primacy and animal nature that is universal to most men. It is an abstract idea and only a slight hint of things to come. The primal instinct would probably remain concealed in Ed Gentry if extraordinary circumstances did not require it to surface. His friend Lewis (aptly played by Burt Reynolds in the film), on the other hand is the opposite type of person. One of those men you encounter sooner or later in a bar, or neighborhood PTA meeting, Lewis is a loud, and vocal promoter of the animal within. But as irony would have it, it is Ed and not Lewis who displays the killer instinct when it is most needed. Dickey also displays tremendous psychological insite during the critical rape scene. His description of the victim, his friend who watches helplessly, and his irreverent savior are all too real. In addition to Dickey's psychological insite, I enjoyed his description of the canoe trip down the river, which was almost certainly based on direct experience. Most of all, I loved the novel's irony. Four men take a trip down one of the last virgin rivers to experience life in the wild. They get what they came there for.
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Summary: Not for the urban reader
Review: I have seen the film and that is the reason I was able to finish reading this book. Everyone here seems to celebrate Dickey's prose as poetic, but I thought it was as a whole sloppy and rambling and unbalanced. The descriptions of the river and the cliffs were nearly impossible to visualize for anyone who has never been outdoors. I found the twenty pages of Ed Gentry climbing the face of a cliff so excruciating that I wanted to put the book down. City readers should see the movie first or else they would be completely lost. I did however find the novel very original and the plot and characters well-crafted; especially the model in Ed's studio, and Bobby whom I felt sorry for because of his brutal ordeal and the afterward callous treatment inflicted by Ed and Lewis.
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Summary: Skip the Book, Check out the Movie
Review: This is the rare case of a story told in the first person in which I really didn't like the narrator at all. Most narrators are usually someone most people can easily identify with; he should be a kind of everyman who is recognizable enough that you will readily accept his eyes and ears as your own. This did not happen with "Deliverance." Everytime the narrator opened his mouth I was jolted back to the fact that he is just an unpleasant, sarcastic wiseguy. (I felt that way throughout the book, not just at moments when he was under immense stress.) Beyond that, the plot of the story was very strong, although I had learned through cultural osmosis alone what the major turning point of the story was, so it did not have the impact on me that it might have. Dickey does a good job of creating a physical landscape, and I had no trouble envisioning what was happening. Sometimes, though, with just a few words, the writing tried to veer off into a stream-of-consciousness that left me flat. Personally, I would recommend skipping the book and checking out the movie. Jon Voigt makes for a much more sympathetic character in the movie, and the movie sticks close to the plot of the book while surpassing it artistically.
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Summary: Even better than the movie!
Review: This is the rare book that produces a great film, but makes for even finer literature. Dickey won a National Book Award for his poetry long before he published Deliverance, which was his first novel. This novel, like his later 'To The White Sea,' is poetic prose. It adds so much to a story to tell it with such style. Current bestselling writers need to learn something about prose so they too can write literature of this quality. One of the finest novels of this or any century.
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Summary: Anyone for Banjo pickin'?
Review: A great book! Even though the plot was crude and the human setting rough and hickish, the quality of the writing made it seem vividly real, both terrifying and glorious. I think Dickey has captured, through the narrator Ed, the experince soldiers and other toughened men must mentaly go through in achieving manhood. A careful reader will notice than Dickey includes subtle commentary on the decline of quality of manhood in our easy, modern times, symbolised by the, uh, ordeal that Bobby was subjected to by the rather unpleasent men they encountered in the woods. All in all, a great read. . .and I'm sure glad that I'm not into whitewater canoeing in backwoods Georgia. . . .
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Summary: The American Dream of Deliverance
Review: Incredible book, written with such poetic language that any reader could fall into the novel and miss most of the content. Must read more than once to get everything worth while. I think the one of the most important ideas of Deliverance is that of the American Dream. Lewis' dream was to battle the wilderness. What happens, though, when you have an opportunity to accomplish that dream? What is reality, and how does one react when their dream turns into a nightmare? My favorite picture in the novel, though, is on the theme of man vs. nature. The incredible sight of the river holding Drew up against the rocks, eyes and mouth open, as if displaying him like we display our deer on the den wall. Nature had won, their dream was most certainly flawed, and reality was that they were just men, and even with the advancement of technology, we cannot totally overcome nature.
Rating:
Summary: Kick A$$
Review: Best novel that I have read in a decade. Dickey pulls the reader down stream through the entire book and doesn't disappoint with the finish. A must read for all people who are literate.
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