Boston: Little, Brown and Company
346 pp., hardback
$23.95.
A world of questionable coastal transactions
The cover of William Carpenter’s second novel is a bit deceptive. In one of photographer Peter Ralston’s signature Maine coast seascapes, a lobsterboat motors across flat water, trailing a wake of seagulls. It’s a finest kind of day, the sky, sea and distant islands caught in a late afternoon glow. What Carpenter describes for us within, in brilliant prose from bow to stern, is what is happening on the deck of that boat: sex, booze and country music.
The WOODEN NICKEL belongs to Lucas “Lucky” Lunt, a 46-year-old lobsterman running traps out of Orphan Point. When we meet him, he is about to resume his livelihood after recovering from a major heart operation. His family is dysfunctional, but still functions: a devoted wife, Sarah, who makes sea-glass mobiles for a local craft gallery; a smart daughter, Kristen, who will be the first Lunt to attend college; and a rebellious son, Kyle, who deals in illegal seafood and is gay.
Enter Ronette Hannaford, a waitress in a local restaurant, who signs on to be Lucky’s sternperson and proceeds to seduce him in the cockpit of the Wooden Nickel. When word gets out that she is pregnant, Lucky’s wife leaves him. Meanwhile his daughter has taken up with the son of wealthy summer people and his son drifts further into the world of questionable coastal transactions, a world Lucky is drawn into when the Coast Guard takes away his fishing license.
Lucky responds to just about everything in an off-color manner. His take on Greenpeace, President Clinton, Bill Gates, Swedes, Massachusetts residents, yuppie kayakers, et. al., sometimes recalls the comedic rantings of Archie Bunker; at other times, his militia pronouncements make one wince. Certain resentments seem well founded as when Lucky complains about the local seafood takeout that charges $18.95 for lobster he sold to them for $3. Prospective readers should know that the book is rife with obscenities, but that they are deployed with great flair.
The characters in The Wooden Nickel often seem larger than life; the scale of their desires, rages, hungers and flaws sometimes Rabelaisian. You might come across a man who could devour an eclair in a single bite, for example, but when he opens his huge jaws “like a basking shark” to do so, we recognize the eye of a poet. Lucky’s refrigerator is “so full of Rolling Rock bottles it looks like a Christmas tree farm.”
It’s not quite the “ripped from the headlines” stuff of television dramas, yet Carpenter weaves in a number of hot Maine coast topics, including whale entanglement and the loss of the groundfish industry. One chapter recounts a lobster boat race, an event that has become big-time – not quite nautical NASCAR, but getting there, with an increasing number of competitors and ever faster vessels (in the 1999 Winter Harbor races two diesel-powered boats broke 50 mph).
Any book about the sea and whales is bound to draw comparisons to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (Lucky tells Ronette that Moby Dick was a “one-legged skipper out of New Bedford” who “killed so many whales the government shut down the fishery”). Carpenter carries on his predecessor’s attention to detail in his descriptions of lobstering, the makes of boat and engine types. An avid sailor himself, the author uses his knowledge of Maine waters to great advantage.
In the end, one comes to feel empathy for Lucky and his unlucky lot in life. For all his tirades against the powers-that-be, he can wax philosophical. “If there was to be a God, which is not likely in this numb universe,” he muses at one point, “He would be down under the surface where the real power is, in the cold invisible currents of the sea.”