Culling Fields

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 18, 1999 | by Rex Roberts

Crabs, crime and class ... a new novelist puts his all into a book as big as the Cheasapeake.

Slow to start but fast to finish, The Waterman (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.95, 312 pp) by Tim Junkin is an ambitious debut by a writer who gives us something rare: a novel about working-class people that's part thriller, part love story, part paean to a dying way of life -- the watermen who ply the Chesapeake Bay.

Junkin is trolling well-fished waters here -- the Chesapeake has been setting and subject of books by John Barth, James A. Michener and other prominent authors. But Junkin, a Washington attorney, has the advantage of having been a waterman himself before studying law, and whatever else one can say about his first attempt at fiction, he clearly knows and cares about this noble inlet, home to so much history. Indeed, The Waterman draws heavily on the Chesapeake as a metaphor for traditional American virtues (independence, loyalty, endurance) and contemporary American vices (pollution, corruption and that old standby, moral confusion).

The novel's eponymous hero, Clay Wakeman, has dropped out of college following the death of his father, a waterman who has drowned in the bay. Although few can make a living crabbing -- it's 1972, year of Hurricane Agnes, and the Chesapeake is suffering from environment shock Wakeman longs to follow in his father's wake. (The protagonist's surname begs bad puns; Junkin is a bit heavy on the throttle with his allusions.) Clay's desire is complicated, however, by memories of his father's adulterous affair and his own cheating heart. Is his desire for his trusting buddy's girlfriend lust or is it love, and is his decision to refurbish his father's boat a subliminal attempt to plumb the depths of these lecherous waters?

Clay struggles with other demons, too, and some ethical issues with a capital E (that stands for environment, as in estuary). Clay certainly is searching for the right way to live, a Hemingwayesque quest accented by Junkin's prose style -- the author favors simple declarative sentences and craftsmanlike precision, especially when his protagonist is navigating the Chesapeake:

"Taking the tiller, Clay looked at the clear sky and took the measure of the bright night," writes Junkin, in a pretty good pastiche of Papa. "He had easily seen the shining white of the boats moored along the creek and now saw the water shimmering out in the Bay. Even the marsh flats alongshore reflected the moonlight. The darkness wasn't deep enough to shroud them, even without running lights. The stars were faint, but Clay found the Dipper's handle off the horizon to the west. Four or five hours left till dawn."

First novelists wrestling with Hemingway usually lose, but Junkin holds his own in The Waterman. He writes well, anxiety of influence and all. He runs into trouble with narrative, however. The novel takes too much time getting out of dock, and its plot, though admirable in outline, lists to starboard -- most of the action takes place in the last chapters. To wit, Clay and his crabbing partner Byron, a boyhood pal turned troubled Vietnam vet, find themselves competing with some ugly potters for the few crabs left in the bay following Hurricane Agnes. If Clay and Byron can't lay their pots, they will lose their investment in the boat and, most likely, their only chance to ply their trade. But Hurricane Agnes isn't the only destructive force roiling the waters that summer of 1972. Big money, drugs and other modern poisons have begun to foul the bay area, and Wakeman finds himself in the eye of a storm that is shattering more than his own small world.

To his considerable credit, Junkin is casting his nets wide in The Waterman--he packs a lot into this novel. He also isn't interested in writing a conventional thriller, undoubtedly the reason he wades so leisurely into his narrative. And he convincingly re-creates the lives of blue-collar workers without condescension -- no easy task. All things considered, The Waterman succeeds ... although, like picking crabs, there's some work to get to the meat. But worth it.

Rex Roberts is features editor for Insight.