| Reviewed by
Robin Vidimos |
March
4, 2001 |
"WOODEN
SEA' A STRANGELY CREDIBLE ADVENTURE
MAGICAL REALISM DELIVERS ENGAGING IDEAS
Sunday, March 4, 2001
BY ROBIN VIDIMOS
SPECIAL TO THE DENVER POST
The Wooden Sea" is a smoothly surreal work of magical realism,
well-constructed and compulsively readable. It is a book that shifts
seamlessly from the familiar to the unlikely in a strangely credible
adventure. Set in the small upstate New York town of Crane's View,
readers are reacquainted with characters that Jonathan Carroll introduced
in his compelling 1998 work, "Kissing the Beehive." There
is nothing like a well-drawn small town to bring strangeness home,
and there is nothing like Carroll's direct prose to bring it to
life.
Frannie McCabe is a happy man. He's doing a great job as chief of
police, an accomplishment no one would have predicted given his
past as the ringleader of the town's juvenile delinquents. He's
in love with his wife and gets along well with his stepdaughter.
It is fantastic that something as mundane as a dog could change
it all. Old Vertue, identified by the heart-shaped name tag on his
red leather collar, is a stray. Three-legged, one eye missing, he's
a dog that has been through it all, but there is a look in his eye
that endears him to Frannie. Instead of ending up with certain euthanasia
at the pound, he is given a home at the police station. It is not
a long stay. After two days of labored breathing, Old Vertue looks
Frannie in the eye, winks and dies.
Frannie gives the dog a decent burial in the woods. Home for lunch
the next day, he's enticed to his garage by a wonderful aroma that
is reminiscent of all the good things he's ever smelled. He pops
open the trunk of his car and finds the body of Old Vertue.
It's a sight that would send all but the most self-possessed running
for the hills. Frannie, instead, turns to his best friend, George
Dalemwood. George holds the job everyone wishes really existed:
He earns his living writing clearly understandable instruction manuals.
George comes up with an answer, but it's a disturbing one. He figures
that Frannie is either the victim of an elaborate joke or the focus
of a metaphysical nightmare.
The correct answer, of course, is that Frannie is caught in the
nightmare, and what a strange dream it turns out to be. He's bounced
between his past, present and future, for reasons that are revealed
to the reader just as gradually as they are to the victim at the
center of the plot.
Carroll's strange tale holds a particularly enticing kernel at its
center. What would it be like if you could take your middle-age
knowledge and sensibility and bring it back to your youth? What
if you could counsel your parents about how to deal with your adolescent
self? What if you could share insight about your future with the
teenage you? And, if you could do that, could you really make your
younger self listen? It's an engaging idea that lies just beneath
the surface of the story.
One of the book's most touching scenes is when the adult Frannie
meets his father who, at that time, is Frannie's age. It is a meeting
that is bittersweet, one that allows Frannie to see his father eye-to-eye
as an adult and one that allows him to explain the youthful and
often hurtful high jinks of his spirited younger self to the old
man. The meeting highlights the juxtaposition of adult and hurt
child in one man, a piece of writing that rings familiar and true.
"The Wooden Sea" never ceases to provoke and entertain.
Carroll has a gift for collapsing the telescope of his prose, depicting
characters and situations cleanly, without excess, but also managing
to home in straight to the heart of the matter. The result is a
reading experience as smooth and comfortable as a conversation with
an old friend.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who regularly
reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the Burbs.
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