Several new novels set in Alaska -- by writers whose association with the state is somewhat tenuous -- have arrived from major publishers in the past few months. Here are three:
"Rogue's Yarn," by Marcia Simpson, takes place in Southeast, where widowed Jess spends most of the book drunk, drugged or sleeping with candidates for "America's Stupidest Criminals." Here, her son overhears her talking to herself in two voices when she's merely stoned:
"Let's imagine Matt a father.
"Impossible.
"I agree. He spawns, not fathers. There are better things than staying with such a man. No doubt I'll discover them.
"I thought Matt knew something I needed to know, that his organ voice would boom out 'You Are Here,' but no. We will never be anywhere, not this child of ours with her pickled brain, not Matt waiting for the woman to bring him her fear, not I, Jess Rohlik, lost while sitting on the couch listening to all the Good News."
In large chunks of chapters given to Jess' stream of consciousness, her rambling crosses into incoherence. It's from the primary storyteller, her youngest son, Tom, that we learn the details about his frustrated teenage brother Bo, his fetal-alcohol syndrome baby sister Toby, how his mom drags the family from their "dinky doo town" (think Hoonah or Gustavus) to Ketchikan in the company of a bad boyfriend.
Tom is a likable, loyal, spunky character in the Huck Finn mold. He and Bo steal a boat and abduct their plotched mother in a desperate attempt to get back home. The last half of the book is a page-flipping sea chase through a winter storm. Simpson, who lives in Washington's San Juan Islands and has voyaged through Southeast, knows her nautical terms and the waters.
But the author seems to know less about alcoholic behavior. Jess' abrupt transformation from notorious to nurturing seems improbable. The denouement implies that Mom is all better now and everything will be fine. Why? Maybe magic. That critical disappointment aside, the chase scene could lend itself to a gripping movie.
"Rogue's Yarn" has several characters tell the story in separate first-person chapters. So does "Unseen Companion," by Denise Gosliner Orenstein, published by a HarperCollins imprint (Katherine Tegen Books, $15.99).
Orenstein's primary narrator is Lorraine Hobbs, a redneck 14-year-old transplanted to Bethel, fixated on fashion and lifestyle articles she absorbs from magazines that she incessantly reads and regularly cites:
"Well, maybe you do, and maybe you don't" I say under my breath ("Confronting Authority: How to Stay Cool and in Control," The Contemporary Woman). My azure-blue and white flowered pedal pushers ride up my calves, leaving pale, freckled skin exposed, and I sigh heavily, wishing I could get me a nice summer tan for once in my pitiful life. I look over at Mama, who leaves her spoon and mixing bowl right there on the table, with batter spread all over the counter, for heaven's sake. She wipes her hands right on her overalls -- a grown woman in overalls looks mighty peculiar, if you have a mind to ask me -- and clears her throat."
Three other teenagers take turns as narrators: a preacher's kid, a boy from Hooper Bay who is usually looking for a bottle and a girl from Sleetmute who has a baby by her counselor at the Mt. Edgecumbe boarding school. What links them is another boy who assaults a teacher at Mt. Edgecumbe and gets "disappeared" at the Bethel jail.
The voices of the other characters never come close to the liveliness of Lorraine. Here's how the Hooper boy, Edgar Kwagley, sounds:
"They stick me here in this receiving home, like some dumb kid, like somebody don't even know his own name. Them little children, they run around all day, and I can't even get me no sleep."
It's particularly distracting for an Alaskan to encounter factual errors that might go unnoticed by Lower 48 readers. The jacket says the author, who now lives in Washington, D.C., previously lived and taught in 14 Alaska Bush villages. So she should know that Unala-kleet is not "upriver" from Bethel but on the coast. Earthquake Park is not three blocks from the "Anchorage Westbard (sic) Hotel" or even close to downtown. Bethel's main drag is not "Front Street." First Avenue in Anchorage has never had a McDonald's.
Edgar says Hooper Bay has only one television station. Some men are said to be working on the pipeline. But the story is set in the first part of 1969, before any Yukon-Kuskokwim villages had television, before the state auctioned off leases in Prudhoe Bay, before Congress authorized building the pipeline, before McDonald's fried a single burger in Alaska.
The personality of Lorraine could float a whole series by itself, if the books took place in a setting more familiar to the author. Here it's hobbled by, among other problems, a clumsy attempt to shoehorn broad elements of Yup'ik spirituality into the tale.
Those elements are somewhat more successfully incorporated into Liam Callanan's "The Cloud Atlas" (Delacourte Press, $22.95) but only because they are incidental to the style, not an attempt to enlighten his fellow non-Natives. "Atlas" flirts with magical realism. Ghostly uncertainties accompany the brute realities of life, death, action and accident -- without excuses or explanation.
The single narrator tells three stories simultaneously. The main storyline relates his experience as a World War II explosives specialist, sent to Alaska to chase down Japanese balloon bombs. In Anchorage, he becomes part of a triangle with his insane commander and a mysterious Russian-Yup'ik palm-reader. The secondary narrative involves the same soldier, now an aging priest, watching at the deathbed of a Kuskokwim shaman he has known for years. The third story, placed at the opening of the book's major divisions, relates, in reverse chronology, a frantic attempt to save a dying boy. All three lines merge eventually in an resolution of literary chords. The reader sees this coming, but the writing sustains the tension until the moment of release.
Callanan has a knack for reworking cliches into fresh meditations. Here, his narrator reflects on those he's watched die:
"We hear people talk about how one's life passes before one's eyes, and we think of a parade, with a beginning and an end. But it's not like that. The dying don't see their lives pass: Their lives flash, complete and vanish. It's the lifeless corpse that lingers."
Like Orenstein, Callanan, also of Washington, D.C., has empirically questionable passages. Some communities described have no legitimate analog in Alaska. It seems to get dark in the summer; his protagonist even sees the northern lights in Anchorage in June. But in the context of magical realism, where the reader isn't sure where Anchorage and June end and some kind of supernatural place and time begin, one can perhaps be more accepting of such eyebrow-raisers.
With its polished form and language, unexpected and haunting episodes and the powerful metaphor of the beautiful, lethal balloon bombs, "Atlas" will be the title of choice for those who enjoy serious literature -- despite its indulgence in shamans, spirit helpers and little people.
What all three books have in common is a depiction of Alaskans as heavy substance abusers in a hardscrabble, mostly wilderness Appalachia where myth and fact mix daily and the future seems to never quite arrive. The tale of a mostly sober commuter addressing tumultuous personal issues in an Alaska city -- the tale of life as most readers of this paper know it -- doesn't seem to fire the imagination of out-of-state writers.
Why should it? That kind of story could just as well transpire in Buffalo.
Mike Dunham is an assistant features editor and can be reached at mdunham@adn.com.
Review
"The Cloud Atlas" by Liam Callanan (Delacorte Press, $22.95)
"Unseen Companion" by Denise Orenstein (Katherine Tegen Books, $15.99)
"Rogue's Yarn" by Marcia Simpson (Berkley Books, $14)
