BEFORE THE WIND
JIM LYNCH
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2016
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| Hardcover...cover. Chip Kidd kicks ass. |
I've never gone out of my way to read a
novel about sailing. I live in a seaside town that attracts a fair
share of nautically-inclined tourists each year, and you can spot
them a mile away—the over-starched polo shirts, the alarmingly
tight blue shorts. As any local could tell you, a
certain country-club snottiness hovers around these men like bad
aftershave: your hometown is, to them, a glorified playground. So I
picked up Before the Wind with
some hesitation; would I be subjected to romantic blathering about
fancy yachts and the daffy one-percenters who foolishly pour their
bank accounts into them?
My worries were
misplaced, because early on Joshua Johannssen, our protagonist, makes
it clear that he's not among the yachting class; he's a modest boat
repair man, eking out a living in Olympia, Washington, near Seattle.
He's got tales to tell: “Consider the new owner of that gutted
twenty-one foot speedboat against the fence there. He rammed the gas
dock so hard last week that he tore a hole in the bow because he
couldn't find the brake.” However, Joshua isn't just a
blue-collar wise-ass, he's descended from sailing royalty. The
Johannsssens owned the seas of Washington for decades, his father so
skilled at carving through the waves that he won an Olympic silver
medal. Through flashbacks we learn that Joshua's gifted sister Ruby
nearly made the Olympics herself before dramatically throwing it all
away, wanting a different life for herself. And Joshua's brother
Bernard, a rebel since childhood, has fled to the South Pacific after
becoming a fugitive.
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| The paperback cover, a real gem. |
Joshua, compared to
his speedboat siblings, is a dependable tugboat. He helps his
neighbors with their boats (he, naturally, lives on a houseboat) and
tries to find the perfect match through the wonders of online
dating...which never goes well. Let's just say that he ends up
dressed like a turtle in a parade at one point. He's watched his
entire family explode and go off in different directions, most of them adrift.
This is what I
loved most about Before the Wind—most other writers would
have written about the early, triumphant days of the Johannssens, a tight
unit that lived happily in a rambling shack lovingly called the
Teardown, watching Mary Tyler Moore re-runs and coming up with
creative ways to win the next race. However, Lynch firmly places the
action in the present; like Joshua, we miss the eccentric, bombastic
family with all their faults and personal weaknesses.
That's when Ruby
comes back into everyone's lives to talk them into having one more
race; she lives in Canada, and no one really knows where Bernard is
month-to-month, but Joshua knows that he can bring them all together. There's
so much to discover in this book: the mystery of Ruby, who seems to
literally levitate as she sails; Bernard's shady smuggling; and
Joshua's coworker at the repair shop, Noah, who is haunted by his
father's end-of-days prophecies (he's even erected a
billboard in town proclaiming that the END IS NEAR that torments Noah
as he works). Joshua has a personality of his own—shy, reserved,
yet razor sharp in his analysis—but the greatest gifts of this book
are the boatload of wacky folks that bob in and out of the story like
Grady, another one of Joshua's boat mates who lives in a rotting
yacht that he (foolishly, romantically) wants to restore to its
former glory, complete with a baby grand piano.
Lynch always reminds
us there's an end on the horizon as the final race gets closer and
closer, but he's not afraid to stop and breathe in the sea air, like
with this passage: “For a full hour I had the planet to myself, my
wake fanning out some mysterious message across the glassy inlet, the
sky and trees more vivid in reflection than in reality.” And he
can't resist muddying all that beauty with the bitter truth: “Then,
so swiftly, the mirror faded, and the harsh sun illuminated the
humdrum of yet another day, I-5 droning in the background.”
I'd argue that's
the main thrust of the book. Joshua's dad is an aggressive romantic
who is convinced that any problem or setback can be solved with
verbal swagger and bullying (he even makes deckhands jump overboard
if they carry too much wait). He's desperate for relive his past
victory, the glory of being validated by the sailing world once
again, on the other side of greatness. Joshua, however, can see that
there's more to life than sailing; the bad dates and frustrating boat
repairs and family arguments make life that much richer. Lynch is
like a boxer, never letting the novel become too sentimental, adding
a cold splash of setback anytime Joshua thinks he has it all figured
out.
I'm thrilled to see
that Lynch has written three more novels; I'm skeptical they'll all
me as genuinely moving and funny as Before the Wind, but I'm
filling to wade into the deep end to find out.
