Dramatic Tale of a Small-Time Lobsterman’s Loss

THE WOODEN NICKEL

A Novel

By William Carpenter

Little, Brown

346 pages, $23.95

Third-generation Maine lobsterman Lucky Lunt cannot abide the changes in the fishing world, nor those he finds in his own family. At 46, Lucky’s kids, Kyle and Kristen, are nearly grown and his wife, Sarah, has taken up sea-glass sculpture, leaving her less time to dote on her husband as she had for the last 21 years. Added to this, Lucky suffers from a heart condition, and after recent surgery he remains under strict orders to dramatically revamp his lifestyle. With hospital bills threatening, the embattled lobsterman finds himself in an unbearable bind.

William Carpenter’s descriptions of the fisherman’s life off the Atlantic Coast vividly bring the sea to life in his novel “The Wooden Nickel,” titled after its protagonist’s lobster boat. Carpenter successfully renders the rapidly vanishing world of small-time lobstermen facing the loss of their manner of livelihood. But Carpenter seems all sea legs when it comes to his depictions of the relations between men and women. The tiresomely stereotypic dichotomy between the mother and the seductress reigns over the novel, in which Lucky’s soon-to-be castoff wife, Sarah, fills the mother’s role, while the younger Ronnette does a smack-up job of playing the latter.

The deck seems stacked against Sarah, whose “familiar papery skin” seems to have grown untouchable. But 16 years younger than him, Ronnette seems nothing short of the cat’s meow, or at least the lobsterman’s bait to Lucky: “... Ronnette’s got a face that makes her look naked even with an overcoat on.”

Carpenter’s failure to credibly imagine his female characters works to erode readers’ sympathies for his hulking, all-man hero, because we never feel that his attachments go beyond the surface. Sarah now has her own pursuits, and though she still wakes before Lucky to lay out his clothes and fix his meals, her husband manages nothing but disdain for her “art.” Lucky stares and stares at Sarah’s mobiles, unable to fathom why anyone would spend time on them. But Carpenter doesn’t give us much insight into what Sarah feels or thinks either. Rather, she seems a cardboard cutout of the middle-aged wife. Her response to Lucky’s infidelity seems scarily reasoned and monotone, and not particularly believable given her devotion to her husband.

Carpenter humorously shows that Lucky has become a dinosaur, unable to adapt to change. Yet we might feel more sympathetic if Lucky made the least effort to reflect on his difficulties. Kyle seems headed for no good, involved in fishing scams, flunking out of high school, but all Lucky can do is meanly condemn the boy, occasionally giving him a smack or two to set him straight. And after his divorce, Lucky doesn’t keep much contact with his kids, and, a few months later, he sees a young woman on the street and begins his usual obsessive appraisal of her looks, only to discover that he’s ogling his own daughter. When Kirsten invites him to meet her college roommate, Lucky finds it difficult to focus on anything but the young woman’s cleavage.

Lucky’s fishing problems come across with drama and authenticity, but his response to them seems so relentlessly reactive that readers may lose patience with him here as well. When a whale raids his traps, Lucky sets out to kill it, mindless of the disaster he is bound to bring on. His boat’s name suggests his fate, yet even this ironic deflation doesn’t quite redeem Carpenter’s protagonist, or the novel itself.