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CHUM ________ By Paul Lopez Staff writer
Set on a nameless island in the Bering Strait, and populated by fishermen who sell fishmeal to foreign nations for use in dog food, "Chum" is a story of collisions: between nature and man, and between man and man. It is partly the story of April Berger, a television actress and sometime-Hustler centerfold (not porn star, as both jacket and press release curiously proclaim) who has been shipwrecked on the island. It is also the failed-love story of Yann and Nadine, two of the island's residents. And, on a grander scale, it is a study of that most familiar of literary topics, "the human condition," which in the context of "Chum" takes on more ecological dimensions. Beginning with the novel's opening 214-word sentence, we know we are in the hands of a capable stylist and nimble linguist. But if "Chum" fails, it is not so much from a lack of sophistication in the language as from a lack of sophistication in its ideas. Like pop icon Marilyn Manson or cable television's animated South Park, the novel begins to follow a weakly predictable formula. "That didn't shock you?" it seems to wink, "How about this?" The insult to the reader's intelligence is the presumption that she or he could find anything at all shocking in these familiar and all-too-common real-life grotesques: a community that is impoverished spiritually as well as economically; the embittered crone; the corrupt priest; the sadistic father; the self-loathing daughter. And though the writer portends to show us the evil lurking behind the mall-shiny finish of contemporary life, finally the joke is on the author, because really he is only winking at himself. Life is full of horror. Yes, we get it. Does the author? Like a formulaic greeting card is boring because it addresses only one dimension in a complex life, "Chum," too, needs to see further, be more, to be memorable. "Lemme tell you," says island matriarch Mother Kralik, finding the unconscious April washed up on the shore. "There's two types of rats in this sh__hole, people! There's the whore, and there's the whorer! And the whorer whores the whore, which is the horror of whoring!" Horrors. The melodrama and over-emoting of the narrative is reflected in the use of frequent double punctuation, particularly question marks paired with exclamation points a style better suited to comic books than works of fiction. As a rule of thumb, emphasis is better carried by word choice than the squiggles that terminate sentences. As for human moments, "Chum" has them, particularly in the doomed love between Yann and Nadine, or April's all-too-brief childhood madeleines. The book could benefit from more of these moments. Relying on the shock value of profanities is a mistake. Profanities come and go. Human moments, in all their winding coloratura, are eternal. "Now Nadine and Yann are alone. She looks up at Yann, and Yann looks down at her. What she sees is one hunk of a man, bound by clothes, wet with sweat and rain. She'd like to stroke his head. What Yann sees, however, is a pathetic, homely girl who's been deceived by her father, and he pities her." "Chum" also shines when it turns a more loving eye upon the delicate ecosystems of the Arctic Ocean. "First the fishermen go out and chum the kelp fields with what is left from the shark bombardment. Then the boats go out and drop their dredging nets which is illegal in all countries of the world, because dredging drags across the bottom, tearing up ecosystems. It takes decades to recover. Fish take off, populations are lost, extinction occurs. All in the name of dog food." Here at last is something to care about. As an allegory of human failure in an ecological world, "Chum" is successful. As a 223-page session of shock therapy, it fails. Human moments have an infinite shelf life. The ecology matters. And in the end, the line between the profane and the boring is surprisingly thin. |