Daniel Gumbiner

This is a quiet, meditative book which combines a fictionalized version of Shopcraft as Soulcraft with the experiences of an opiod addict. Berg is a 28 year old who developed his addiction after a severe concussion. He leaves his high-paying but soul-sucking job in the San Francisco tech industry to move up to the Muire (Marin) County coast. He settles in Talinas, which is a very lightly fictionalized mashup of the small towns around Tomales Bay and Point Reyes, and he takes up boatbuilding with a mentor named Alejandro. He tries to get himself clean and figure out what to do with his life.

Talinas and the surrounding towns and people come across as a rural NorCal version of the quirky towns and townspeople we regularly see on TV. It's more Cicely, AK or Stars Hollow than Twin Peaks, but the townspeople all fill out the various eccentric-but-lovable categories. Alejandro is an idealized version of the Wise Old Man Who Has Seen Everything. He has many, many talents, a lovely wife and family, and a farm that supports them all. Well, actually his boatbuilding business supports them, and the main customer is a drug dealer (only marijuana, none of the bad stuff) who transports his cargo from Mexico to the US in Alejandro's beautiful wooden sailboats.

There's a lot about boatbuilding. A lot. Also a fair amount about fishing and daily life in a coastal rural town. It mostly captures the feel of these places, although there are a few odd missteps, e.g.. in Norcal we call it Highway 1 or just 1, not "the" 1, the definite article is a SoCal thing. Also, radio stations west of the Mississippi start with K, not W, so the indie station WMUR would be KMUR. And there are barely any tourists, unlike the real Marin coast. But otherwise, it's pretty immersive and true to my experience.

The writing style is of the type that seems to be very popular now: it's not minimalist, exactly, but it's unadorned and focused on the mundane:

The best place to see a boat leave was Bear's Landing. These days it was a campground but, according to Alejandro, it had first been settled by Ed Vaquero, an American who gathered abalone and whose last name was not actually Vaquero. No one knew his real name, said Alejandro, but it was not Vaquero. In any case, if you climbed up on the dunes behind the campground at Bear's Landing, you had a panoramic view of the bay and the ocean and this is what Uffa, Berg, and Alejandro did the day Pat left for Mexico.

Berg's struggle with opiods is mostly well depicted, although one of his relapses functions a bit too much as a Black Moment plot device. There are a few other visible plot beats, but that's not surprising in a debut novel.

I enjoyed reading this, but I didn't feel as if I was getting something I hadn't read before. Berg himself wasn't all that interesting, and Alejandro was too idealized. He was supposedly considered crazy or near-crazy by some of the townspeople, and Berg occasionally wondered about this, but I didn't see anything in his actual behavior that couldn't be explained as personality traits. The women are ... fine? They're also idealized and not particularly interesting as people; they mostly are sympathetic and attractive and supportive (to be fair, though, they lead independent lives and aren't just appendages of the male characters).

This is very much a man's book, even though it's about not-quite-mature men in their 20s in a very 21stC way rather than a Hemingway, Mailer, or Updike 20thC way.… (altro)