'Perfect Storm' makes waves

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 17, 1997 | by Liz Trotta

The publicity-shy author of the phenomenal best-seller finds himself on his fourth media tour.

Even as Sebastian Junger's first book heads into its 19th week on the New York Times best-seller list, the intense New Englander can recall in detail how it felt growing up in the suburbs, a frustrated boy with a knack for running who yearned to test his mortality. If he couldn't be a Sioux brave setting out to kill another Indian, there were other ways to make one's mark as a man.

"I wanted to be in what felt like a life-and-death situation," he says, "where the cops were chasing me in the woods and I was outrunning them because I was young and strong, and they were just cops -- to prove, as all young men need to prove, that they are invincible."

Danger in all its seductive power always has attracted Junger, as it did one day six years ago when he watched a terrifying northeaster send 100-foot waves toward the shore of Gloucester, Mass. The experience led him to write The Perfect Storm -- the story of six fishermen aboard the doomed vessel Andrea Gail -- which has sold more than 400,000 copies. Reviewers have raved, dubbing his mesmerizing account of nature's fury a maritime In Cold Blood. Screenwriters are working on the movie. Paperback rights have been sold for $1.2 million. Speaking invitations continue to pour in, and Junger has set out on his fourth media tour.

In a publishing world that honors the self-absorbed and the self-helped The Perfect Storm is a throwback -- an old-fashioned adventure yarn that happens to be true. Junger's book and Jon Krakauer's best seller, Into Thin Air, an account of climbing Mount Everest, have challenged conventional notions about Americans' reading preferences. Some argue that the United States, a nation born through risk, is still a nation that cherishes danger.

"The high mountain and the sea are the only environments where society cannot bail you out," says Junger, who underlines his point with a level gaze. "You can get a liver transplant or go to [Alcoholics Anonymous]. Whatever problem you have, society can fix it for you, except in these two realms. And so to people who may be a little bit jaded, how you survive on your own is interesting."

Junger's literary agent, Stuart Krichevsky, says the book's success already has spawned a new trend of narrative nonfiction. "For whatever succeeds, there are imitators, and publishers who want to publish what worked last year," he says.

Junger once trimmed trees for a living and occasionally returns to the solitary edginess of his old job. It was for peace of mind, not money that he scrambled up a 65-foot ailanthus on Manhattan's West Side last week as though it were a ship's mast squinting into the sunlight, carefully plotting his moves five stories above a small courtyard.

Scaling trees is his antidote to the consuming celebrity that has begun to make him feel there is nothing left to his own identity. Having spent the summer in a blur of book promotions, the 35-year-old author came off the road feeling as disoriented as a sailor who had lost his bearings. "This may sound contrived," he says, wearing a pained expression, "but I feel as though I've lost myself a little bit and I'm desperate to get back to something familiar. I have no desire to be a celebrity of any sort. It's not as much fun as taking down a tree."

For Junger, who grew up comfortably in Belmont, Mass., becoming a millionaire also presents problems. He still lives right up the street from the Hell's Angels' main garage in a cramped and chaotically furnished East Village apartment that he likens to the lost-and-found baggage-claim area of an airport. He says he will stay here because it is a connection to his old life; and besides, he has enough money for hiS needs, plus the luxury of giving away more than $10,000 to friends is need. "If you have interesting friends," he observes, "they're usually broke."

The clutter of his two rooms includes a picture of a hurricane, a piece of driftwood "for warding off pretentious people" and samples of readers' letters that arrive regularly Readers include a shipwrecked man who drifted on a raft for five days and a Guatemalan woman requesting a picture of "the very handsome man" she had seen on television talking about his book. Junger's rugged good looks are in some quarters almost as exciting as his book, a fact that led People magazine to interview his girlfriend for a forthcoming feature on "America's sexiest men."

It is just this kind of fan-magazine ogling that makes Junger wince, afraid of being seen as a freak, not "a journalist respected by other journalists." He is thinking about his next book, most likely a return to men in danger, and has been talking over possible assignments with leading magazines.

Dark-haired, broad-cheated and well-spoken, he appears to be a natural heir to the warrior-scholar tradition. As a young man, he read widely, studied at Concord Academy and majored in cultural anthropology at Wesleyan University. For 15 years he worked as a freelancer, with assignments in Bosnia and Afghanistan, before he stumbled upon the world of commercial fishermen and the stoic daredevils who inhabit it. They were his kind of heroes.