On the River Styx by Peter Matthiessen

Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard.

This stunning collection of short stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most acclaimed literary voices of our time.

Why I Picked It Up

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I keep a pretty healthy rotation of short stories in the mix. When I tally them up on occasion, I realize I read more than I thought. Alice Munro is currently in the lead for me. I used to love Amber Sparks (and still do.) Raymond Carver is excellent at the line level; Miranda July makes me think. Etc., etc.

When I first wrote this review in fall of 2025, I'd recently finished reading a fair number of Matthiessen titles, starting with The Tree Where Man Was Born (whose title I always bungle.) I'd also finished up The Snow Leopard and End of the Earth, and am perpetually wading through Shadow Country. After finishing this last fall, I also read a biography on Peter Matthiessen, which was one of my top books of 2025, but I keep avoiding reviewing it because I could easily write 5,000 words on the subject.

On the River Styx bundles ten of his short stories, completed over the arc of his life. Each has a dark, unsettling structure that aligns sometimes with the Southern Gothic influence I examine for my own work. Bits reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark, or the harsh exposure of Flannery O'Connor.

My Reaction

While I'd say On the River Styx has a broadly unifying aesthetic—even more interesting to examine now that I've read the biography detailing the background behind each of these—I do appreciate how varied this collection is. The quality varies too, but not in a way adhered to linear time. The later ones are not inherently better.

For that reason, I have a hard time describing what Matthiessen's voice is even like here. In nonfiction, I'd call it relatively neutral.

(Also, fascinatingly enough—a big theme of his biography is Matthiessen grappling with the disjointedness of his own life: an unwillingness to commit to a cohesive and singular self while paradoxically wanting full control over his image and projection. That confusion or sense of lostness may appear format-wise in how all over the place his stories and voice can be, unified instead by his byline and not by some singular quality.)

Fair warning that some stories in this are so horribly obviously written in the 50s. While Matthiessen is attempting in some ways to grapple with race, I found the attempt so clumsy as to feel racist itself. Nowadays, I'm likely rather skeptical or cynical about the desire to write "subversively" considering Matthiessen's position in society, so I don't much like that "Travelin' Man" exists. He often defaults to writing about people of color as being animalistic, and the voice in those works is always very aggressive in a weird way. (If you look at other reviews, you'll see plenty of fawning men saying his stories wouldn't hold up to today's "woke" standards; there is a type.)

I think I have plenty of nuanced thoughts on authors writing about subject matters or demographics that do not belong to them—so I'm not inherently against the artistic choice or intention—but you'll just have to trust me that I'm not purity-testing Matthiessen here. Instead, I just think some of his racial depictions came off as pretty ugly. I'd like to believe the best intentions there, but overall the effect just feels icky. In fairness, I do think his depictions of race get slightly better throughout his career? That's just my initial impression.

Overall Thoughts

I have complicated feelings on Matthiessen, which is why I've been putting off reviewing his biography, but some themes emerge in his works pretty regularly—which are consistently fascinating to unpack.

He loves landscape and escapism (as do I.) He resents his own fragmentation and his lack of a cohesive self—a sense of self-betrayal and crisis that I personally view as related to his own solipsism—so he despises when he has to confront the way others see him. Matthiessen never seems to like bringing himself along, and would prefer to shed his own skin whenever confronted. "The dread of home," anyone? It all reverberates within his characters.

The bleak undercurrent isn't for me, and I didn't like how he attempted to address racial relations here, but I did appreciate his constant experimentation with POV, sentence structure, topics, etc. Whether or not it's effective, even the author's note mentions how his early collection of stories reflected a desire to try on other tones and personas. It's a worthy goal, and roughly the point of writing fiction, so I didn't mind that the attempt towards variation itself could be clunky all together.

“"Most of these early stories revealed very little besides the ambition of the new writer to try on a variety of tones and voices—male and female, black and white, rich and poor, rural and urban—" ”

My favorite story in the bunch was about an argument over whether or not to shoot an old turtle—which did remind me a lot of the melancholy and repression of Alice Munro's body of work, or a similar motif in Jodi Lynn Anderson's Midnight at the Electric. The imagery and dynamics there are just haunting.

For fans of

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; Absalom, Absalom!{' '}by William Faulkner; The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen; True Nature by Lance Richardson; A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.