Salt of the Earth

A lobsterman charts rough seas

By Mike Miliard

The Wooden Nickel: A Novel By William Carpenter, Little, Brown, 276 pages; 342 pages, $23.95.

MAINE MAN: Carpenter has concocted a character so real you can smell the chum wafting off his oilskins.

Times are tough for Lucky Lunt. The cold, choppy Atlantic he’s lobstered life-long ain’t the place it used to be — what with those scumbags from over Shag Island staking out his traps, a Coast Guard that might as well be from Kansas, and a sonofabitch whale that’s taken a liking to tangling with his pot warp. Lucky might have to start haulin’ urchins for those weirdo Asians after all.

Back home to Orphan Point, things ain’t much better. Lucky’s wife left him and repossessed the house when word got out he fooled around with his stern “man,” the buxom Ronette Hannaford. Now Ronette says she’s pregnant. His daughter’s about to go to some fancy college that’s sure to put all kinds of crackpot ideas in her head. His son’s a friggin’ reprobate, and may be a queer. On top of it all, Lucky’s got a bad ticker. Deep in the hole after two angioplasties, it’s been a Christly long time since Lucky’s lived up to his name.

In Lucas “Lucky” Lunt, William Carpenter, a literature professor at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, has concocted a character so real you can smell the chum wafting off his oilskins. And, as crusty and unreconstructed as he is, you have to love him.

Lunt is a man out of time. He’s also man at war — at war with other men (the competitors who would poach his territory, his own family); at war with nature (does his obsessive pursuit of that enormous, elusive whale sound familiar?); and at war with himself (his infidelity, his subsistence on the very diet of steak and Rolling Rock and Marlboros that clogged his heart in the first place). Like a Down East Archie Bunker, Lucky is discomfited by a fast-changing world. So he erects a front of brusque masculinity and holds on fiercely as the tide rises precipitously around him.

These archetypes are as old as the sea. And characters of Lucky’s ilk have existed since long before Ishmael first told us to call him Ishmael. Nothing would be easier, then, than to render this story as a bobbing buoy line of clichés. But Carpenter succeeds grandly in sidestepping stereotype, using an inimitable voice to spin a tale suffused with crabby humor, wry social critique and, yes, pathos.

Much of Carpenter’s success lies in how he gets so many things right. When, for instance, Lucky embarks on lengthy, rapturous interior monologues about the merits of one outboard motor or another, it’s obvious from the minutely detailed specs that Carpenter has done his homework. Throughout the book, prose passages are peppered with resonant lyrics from Nashville crooners like Reba and Garth; Maine lobstermen, after all, see their lives reflected in Today’s Hot Country just as much as Montana ranchers do. Carpenter deftly evokes the sublimated antagonism between the year-round residents who ply the sea, barely getting by, and the rich folk from away who use the rocky coastline as their summer playground (Lucky’s daughter dates a boy from a moneyed family that, worse than being Jewish, employs contractors from Massachusetts to renovate their palatial manse; once Lucky loses it and impulsively drenches a picnicking party on their anchored yacht with his boat’s tsunami-like wake).

More rewarding than these slice-of-life details is Carpenter’s pitch-perfect ear for idiomatic speech patterns and smutty turns-of-phrase. We meet Ryan Beal, “all dressed up in his shit-colored shirt and camouflage tie.” Lucky’s trusty, oft-referenced unit of measurement is “a cunt’s hair.” Clyde Hannaford, the perfidious fish buyer whose trophy wife Lucky impregnates, is described in these sublimely imagistic words: “under the tinted glasses, Clyde’s eyes look like a couple of squirts of gull shit.”

Carpenter’s novel isn’t leak-proof. He doesn’t really explore the ramifications of the abrupt end of the Lunt marriage; Lucky seems almost unaffected that his wife of several decades has left him. And the parallels Carpenter draws between his novel and masterpieces like Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea may strike some as heavy-handed. But, to indulge in one more whale of a pun, these are small fish to fry.

Given all the bad news lately about groundfishing restrictions in the Gulf of Maine, a character like Lucky has a special resonance these days. Carpenter seems to be suggesting that, despite hard-fought perseverance, he and men like him may soon be as endangered as their over-fished catch. Carpenter gets a lot of things right; on this point, let’s hope he’s wrong.

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard@phx.com.