FICTION

THE FORTY FATHOM BANK: A Novella by Les Galloway (Chronicle Books: $10.95; 108 pp.). Les Galloway, for many years a commercial fisherman harboring in Los Angeles and San Francisco, died in 1990 at the age of 78, six years after having written this novella. Although Galloway had published a handful of stories in literary magazines and even Esquire, “Forty Fathom Bank “ was issued privately in 1984--no doubt because commercial book publishers find novellas problematic, especially novellas as old-fashioned as this one. “Old-fashioned” is a compliment when applied to this work, however, because you could easily mistake “Forty Fathom Bank” for top-rank Jack London or B. Traven--stories driven by compulsion and mystery, in which adventure transforms into avarice and worse. The narrator, a wealthy San Franciscan, looks back on his fateful decision to buy a boat many years earlier, when he hoped to set his family free from his insecure job in the real-estate business by starting a sport-fishing operation. The narrator’s rash choice suddenly becomes brilliant, and he hires an eccentric but experienced fisherman to be first mate--who asks for a peculiar fee arrangement, and suggests fishing for shark far from the other boats. A terrible thing happens, naturally, while the two men are at sea, and the reader may well be able to guess what it is, as the one flaw in “The Forty Fathom Bank” is its portentousness. All things considered, though, the book is a gem, for the story reeks of inevitability, enhanced in no small measure by Galloway’s precise, lucid descriptions of commercial fishing.