“The Curve of Equal Time”
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By Thomas McGuire; Boreal Books, 2024; 192 pages; $16.95.
Thomas McGuire, author of the 2019 award-winning novel “Steller’s Orchid,” has returned with a new novel of matching excellence. A longtime Alaskan, McGuire has applied his 30 years of commercial fishing to a story that’s part mystery, part crime, and entirely true to Alaska life. As he said in an interview with his publisher, “I wrote the book to express my deep feelings for the place and the people.”
The well-drawn characters in “The Curve of Equal Time” are realistic, diverse and as fascinating as any we might meet in either literature or real life. The one who holds centerstage is Nora, a fearless and compassionate middle-aged woman, originally from Wrangell, who returns to Alaska as a deckhand after rearing a daughter (and working low-wage jobs) in Seattle. She was once married to a logger and lived in a logging camp before the two started salmon trolling. “In Nora’s memory, she was the one who ran the gear, cooked, and took care of Trish (their young daughter) while Buck chatted on the radio.” Buck later drowned on the Columbia Bar. “One last fling at the moon in one last decrepit boat.”
Early in the story a woman on a competing salmon seiner ends up missing, assumed to have either fallen or jumped from the boat during the night. There are hints of drug use and violence, but fish need to be caught and no one besides Nora seems particularly unnerved by the disappearance. Another woman, one Nora knows from a short time working at the Petersburg cannery, signs on as the replacement. Nora thinks, “Maybe the young could be cold-blooded because they believed that nothing bad could ever happen to them.”
The season continues, with plenty of the real drama of fishing as well as the development of relationships among the crews, on their boats and in town, often in bars and often involving alcohol. The characters run the gamut of experience — in addition to Nora, two skippers of opposite temperaments, a former baseball player in recovery, two small-time drug dealers who’ve done prison time, two college students eager for adventure and tuition money, and many others in supporting roles. (Crew members come and go, quitting or being fired.) While it may be a little hard to keep everyone straight at the start, each of the main ones is very soon distinguished by personality, speech and actions. None are stereotyped as “fishermen”; each is complex, smart and skilled, with both virtues and faults.
The author is especially skilled at capturing the realities of women working in the fleet — where they were usually expected to be cooks and cleaners as well as working on deck, and where they were frequently exploited in other ways. (It’s unclear when the novel takes place, although it’s before the use of cellphones; conditions for women have largely improved with time.)
Overall, McGuire’s writing is as precise and lyrical as any of our best contemporary novelists. It’s also consistently knowing and intelligent about technologies, geography and the natural world, the motives and desires of human beings, and even literary and cultural references. (One character quotes Whitman, another speaks lines from the Catholic Mass for the Dead.) McGuire’s depictions of Southeast Alaska, the world of commercial fishing and human behaviors are perfectly rendered, page after page.
Here’s one of the college students: “Offshore by Shaft Rock the next morning, Sara fought the web that poured over the power block like a river ... No one had warned her about the horror of lion’s mane jellyfish. The seine strained the jellyfish from the sea, and as the net passed over the power block, a stinging slime fell like fiery rain. When they hauled the bunt aboard, the fish died thrashing in a pool of red jelly.”
Elsewhere, “In Scow Bay, a blue heron perched on a three-legged piling. It flew as the ‘Lily’ approached, dropping low to the surface of the water, its neck pulled back in a sinuous curve. Its slate gray wings could have been part of the sky, or the water.”
When one character catches a halibut, he whets a filleting knife and then “held the knifepoint against one of the fish and drew it slowly along the lateral line without breaking the skin. The dorsal fin rippled in reflex, a cresting wave that followed the knifepoint even after death.”
The book’s title is both image and metaphor. In the cafeteria of a floating processor, after delivering their fish, crew members sit together at a table. Sara says something about old fishermen looking mildewed, another says the rain forest has everything and everyone sliding into nothingness together, and Sara explains “the curve of equal time,” a famous math problem. “The shape of the curve, where no matter where you start, you get to the bottom at the same time.”
As the fishing season comes to a close, another person has died, one has been traumatized by violence, and drug dealing is in the open. A duck hunting trip sets the scene for a wild, adrenaline-filled ending that will send readers flying through the final pages.
[Book review: Thrills, romance, 1980s coastal life — Dan Strickland’s debut novel has it all]
[Book review: A debut novel transports readers into the madness of Bristol Bay fishing]
[Book review: ‘Signals’ affirms Kris Farmen’s status as one of Alaska’s finest historical novelists]