Down East Books, 2007
A Surfeit of Understanding
Barter Island, a novel, is based on some of Peter Scott’s own experience on an island a lot like Isle au Haut. In this sequel to an earlier book, Something in the Water, Scott describes what happened back in the 1970s when hippies and Vietnam vets both sought refuge in places like islands off the coast of Maine. Barter Island portrays longtime residents confronted with new arrivals: vets who survived combat but might have psychological injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder; so-called hippies of that generation with a desire to distance themselves from mainstream America, adopt alternative lifestyles, experiment with drugs and sex.
Barter Island illustrates the clashes and misunderstandings that inevitably arose under those circumstances, and also the things that knit a community together from its disparate parts. But overall, the book’s story, full of what we know was intense human drama, feels flat. For a book describing a lot of emotions, it carries little emotional punch. We know everything every character is thinking and feeling; not through dialog per se, which is minimal, but from a kind of omniscient narrative where every nuance is explained to us, to a degree that feels pedantic. It’s like reading a play-by-play account of some sporting event described by a commentator, instead of observing the action yourself, making your own sense of it.
It’s telling that in his day job, Scott is an English teacher in a high school; there is an assumed, authoritative presence in his prose, perhaps cultivated in the classroom. But I’m just the kinda girl, I guess, who questions authorial didactics. What characters do and say can be as revealing, and arguably more interesting, than what we are told they are thinking or feeling. It’s as if Scott didn’t trust that his characters could live their own lives, have their own voices.
The book’s very first words are a quote attributed to Junior Chafin, one of Scott’s island characters: “They say they come down here to find themselves. To look inside themselves and see what’s in there. The thing that surprises me is how long it takes them to realize that there’s nothing there to find out. Whatever in hell made them think there was, do you suppose?” It makes me think Scott wrote this book to prove that premise untrue, knowing there actually was something “there.” After all, he was one of “them,” a Vietnam vet looking for respite on a Penobscot Bay island. That Scott may have felt islanders misunderstood or avoided the unfamiliar or uncomfortable realities in his life, as with other newcomers, is an experience he may still, on some level, grapple with. This overflow of insights now, insistently demanding a reader’s attention in his book, could be compensation for what he wishes they’d had back then — a surfeit of understanding.
Tina Cohen divides her time between Massachusetts and Vinalhaven.