A Test of Manhood? 
 A classic, I know, but I had never read it (nor seen the film). I had two reasons for doing so now. One was a recent hike with my son into the deep woods along the Chatooga, the wild river on the border between Georgia and South Carolina supposed to be the model for Dickey's Cahulawassee. And the other was reading David Vann's recent novel Goat Mountain, which deals with many similar themes. 
 Go to some of the more populous areas of the river, and you will see numerous Whitewater Adventure outfitters ready to load tourists into rafts and take them with a guide through some of the less extreme rapids. But to reach the river further upstream, you take small roads to smaller roads, perhaps marked by a broken-down gas station such as the one where Dickey's four Atlanta businessmen encounter a banjo-playing albino and mountain men suspicious of city strangers. Then a mile or two of dirt road hardly wider than the car. Then a long trek through the woods to reach the river, smooth-flowing enough between its towering banks, but moving into the empty unknown beyond the next bend. 
 Dickey is precise in placing these four men, middle executives with middle age just visible on the horizon, family folk, hoping to prove there is more to life than their routine jobs. There is Lewis, the alpha male whose mastery of physical activity is a demonstrable proof of his manhood; the river trip plays to all his strong suits, and is his idea. Ed, the narrator, is a designer in an advertising agency; a natural follower, he will go along with Lewis in almost anything he proposes, and in fact has already come close to his standard in archery. The other two are Drew, an amateur guitarist who works for Coca Cola, and genial overweight Bobby, everybody's idea of the born salesman. None but Lewis have any experience of canoeing or wilderness techniques; it seems clear that he is leading them into something they may not be equipped to handle, and that will test each of them in different ways. 
 But the principal violence that assails the four is not from the elements but human. Two men appear out of the woods on their second day, and everything changes. It is no longer a test of manhood, but of human nature. Not humanity, for when people are reduced to hunting one another the normal considerations of morality and legality take second place to simply staying alive. It is this fine edge between hunting and killing that most made me think of David Vann. Both authors are superb at bringing the experience of the woods to terrifying life. Dickey does not have Vann's rather tedious passages of philosophy, though I did feel that the detailing of Ed's every thought and movement in the third quarter was excessive. But what I most admire about him (and missed from Vann), was the fact that Dickey sets his book within the context of a life lived in the real world, before and after the weekend in the woods. He does not offer easy answers to impossible moral problems, but he never denies that they matter.