Showing posts with label pacific northwest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pacific northwest. Show all posts

Monday, October 8, 2018

BEFORE THE WIND by Jim Lynch


BEFORE THE WIND

JIM LYNCH

Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2016

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.

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.