RIVERMAN

The captivating story of an inveterate river wanderer who left a mark on many he met along his journeys before suddenly vanishing.

An intelligent, heavyset “misfit,” the artist and one-time hospital worker covered thousands of miles, logging his experiences in some 2,000 pages of text and reams of photographs before his disappearance, somewhere on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In this debut book, longtime New Yorker staff writer McGrath, whose chance encounter with Conant on the Hudson River eventually launched a lengthy retracing of the adventurer’s travels, delivers a worthy combination of character study, travelogue, and missing-person’s story. His portrait, partly propelled by Conant’s own observations, also opens a portal to a world of itinerant men oft misunderstood as vagrants or ne’er-do-wells. More, it is a paean to eccentricity and endurance and a study of a life that changed the chronicler’s own perceptions. McGrath’s writing is measured and confident, the product of a journalist’s persistence in investigating the truth behind so colorful and contradictory a figure. Skeptical at first of Conant’s more implausible stories, McGrath became seduced, but he was too diligent a reporter not to wonder how much was romantic exaggeration or outright delusion. Conant could be erratic, even paranoid, but he was also genial. McGrath’s accounts of his visits to many sleepy riverside towns in search of Conant’s connections unveil a gallery of people no less curious than his subject. Small, telling details also set the book apart. Little escapes the author’s gaze, though in the end he is just as mystified, and uncertain, as anyone over this elusive man’s fate. The tone near the close is almost wistful.

A memorable and intoxicating exploration of what we make of those who reinvent themselves.