Deliverance.

James Dickey’s Deliverance (#42 on the Modern Library 100, as well as part of the TIME 100) is probably best known today for the film it inspired, and that film is unfortunately best known for one scene. That lens distorts the book’s strengths and has almost turned it – and Ned Beatty – into a punchline.

The novel tells of four suburban middle-aged men, three of whom are married with kids, all of whom are in some way bored with their existences. Lewis, the gung-ho weekend warrior of the group, proposes a weekend trip, rafting down rapids in an isolated forest in northern Georgia with some illegal deer hunting thrown in for good measure. The other three men agree, each considering backing out at some point before they hit the river, and their fears, irrational and abstract at the time, prove well-founded when the trip hits a snag and two of the men run into a pair of insane hillbillies. The four suburbanites escape via violence and take off down the river, a trip that leads to more violence and a desperate, intense quest for survival that pushes Ed, the book’s narrator, to the limits of his courage and strength.

Going into the book knowing the basic plot outline affected its ebb and flow for me. Everything leading up to the encounter with the psychotic yokels seemed deliberate, a forced quietude to dull the reader’s senses and increase the impact of the jarring rape scene that sets the adventure/survival portion of the book in motion. The depictions of Ed’s inner thoughts and struggles as he tries to recover from the attack and then assumes a leadership position in the attempt to get out of the woods alive elevate the book beyond a straight adventure novel into something more literary, a psychological thriller that is purposefully light on action as Dickey delves more deeply into Ed’s mental state. Thus establishing his theme, Dickey imbues more tension to the book’s “After” section, where the men have to finesse their way past the local authorities to get out of town.

The whole novel is a psychoanalyst’s – or a psychoanalytically-minded literature student’s – dream. Why, while he’s on the river, does Ed constantly imagine watching the way his wife’s back undulates when they have sex? Why do the men choose to go on this trip in the first place, and then ignore their doubts before they enter the forest? Isn’t it a little creepy that Ed has sex with his wife in the same position as the one used during the rape? (I mean, Dickey could certainly have had them use the missionary position. This had to be a conscious choice by the author.) Is this book, at its core, about the emasculation of the 20th-century American male? I feel like I’m back in my high school AP Lit class, where my teacher found a phallic symbol on every other page, but if I’m picking up on this stuff, I figure it must be pretty blatant, since I was the kid who would argue that the teacher’s oversexed interpretations were wrong. It would make great fodder for a literature paper, but I could have done without some of the imagery.

(Apropos of nothing: Was the rape scene in Pulp Fiction Tarantino’s homage to the scene in Deliverance?)

I’m backlogged on reviews, having knocked off three other books on the trip; I just started Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, another entry from the TIME 100, last night, but I should have reviews of the other books up this week.