Down The River By Yourself: Certain Hazards to the Manufacture of Boys

What isolates individuals in modern life and what does it feel like to be “down the river by yourself”? That’s the broad focus here. More specifically, the novel explores and exposes a common tradition of growing boys into men which often isolates them in this way. By pressuring them to appear tough and invulnerable on the outside, it may turn them into troubled loners on the inside, men who will have difficulty in the modern workplace and as husbands to modern women. The summer camp in the novel models this: a one size fits all culture where young boys learn that the governing rule is always to “sluff it off”, even heavy bullying and sexual humiliation. There is a connection here to the growing domestic violence instigated by angry young men, or their plunge into drug addiction and crime, or at the most extreme the increasing number of terrorists and mass shooters who take out their rage against the society they feel has cheated and humiliated them. Wendell, the hero of the novel, returns as a middle aged man to try reforming the camp where he suffered this abuse as a twelve year old, and for the first time faces his own rage about it, long suppressed. He finds there a modern boy of that same age who is undergoing the same torment, tries to rescue him, and later tries to save a young man of twenty, formed by many of the same boy-raising attitudes, who seems on the way to becoming a terrorist threatening the community where Wendell lives and the woman whom he loves.