Book Review : Underside of the Rock-Bound, Pine-Scented Coast of Maine

Firewater Pond by Michael Kimball (Putnam’s: $17.95)

Around the turn of the century, the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno wrote “Niebla” (Fog), a book that was either a descendant of Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” or a precursor of Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” Because it was quite unlike anything else around, Unamuno decided it should be called, not a novel but a “nivol.”

“Firewater Pond” is like quite a few other books around. As a group, though, they have rather a distant relationship to the novel family. Call them “noveels.”

Noveels are cartoon strips without drawings. They are 90% plot, which is of the agglutinative kind and consist of episodes linked by “and thens” and arranged in a crescendo. They are 5% characterization, which in the better ones--”Firewater Pond” is a better one--have a promise of wit and originality that is gradually starved out by the voracity of the plot. They are 1% emotions, running to “Grrr,” “Mmmm,” “Awp” and signifying, respectively, indignation, desire and comical haplessness.

The missing 4% is for the film or TV rights. Noveels contain a number of scenes that are visual slapstick, diagrammed though not conveyed, in words.

“Firewater Pond” tells of the sudden rejuvenation of a derelict tourist camp set in one of the scruffier parts of Maine. The author, Michael Kimball, is the main resident and knows that it is not all lobsters, rock-bound coasts and pine-scented air.

Perennially threatened with closure by the local health authorities--who are crooks and would like to buy it up cheap--the camp is operated in a dreamy and marginal fashion by Carl Dixon, an independent-minded local. Among the handful of residents are Zippy and Ruth, a couple emerging from hippie-dom; Angel, a sexy earth-mother; a pleasantly dim-witted hired hand named Harvey; and a cocaine-dealing motorcycle gang called the Mutants.

Change comes with the arrival of Larry, Zippy’s twin brother and an energetic promoter whose schemes, up to this point, have never quite worked out.

More or less by violent accident, Larry manages to evict the Mutants, and finds himself in possession of a small fortune in cocaine. He sells it, sets himself up as Dixon’s partner, seduces and marries his stubby, sex-mad daughter, and proceeds with plans to trim the camp into a combination of animal park, boating site, Indian village and quite a bit more.

There are, as you may guess, ups and downs. Among them are a disastrous attempt to clean up the pond, a rampage by a moose, the back-to-nature peregrinations of a man who decides he is a full-blooded Indian, civic warfare of various kinds, and a round of mixed beds and identities set off by Larry’s Don Juan tendencies and his resemblance to his twin brother.

Kimball, who is a music teacher, manages the action well enough. “Firewater Pond” moves or, at least, it is moved; like others of its kind, it is clotted with plot, but rarely to the point of jamming.

As for the characters, Larry, all motor, is a bore; his young wife is a modular specimen of the steamy teen-ager; and the would-be Indian is barely a notion. Others, though, are genuinely funny or at least appealing.

Carl, with his dreamy passiveness--perhaps, under the circumstances, because of it--has real charm. He does not withhold himself from the action, but his best pleasure is getting his fried eggs just right. Zippy, the hippie, who firmly believes that people on the moon are going to come for him, has his moments.

The trouble, though, and it is characteristic of the noveel, is that the frail but authentic originality of some of the characters is worn out by all they have to do. It is like taking a marsh hike in slippers.