the where of it

new mexico reads wrecker

• Posted by Summer Wood on April 18th, 2011 filed in books
• 2 Comments »

I got an email this morning from a friend who directed me to New Mexico Magazine — and here’s what I found:

Fiction
Wrecker
By Summer Wood
Bloomsbury USA
304 pages, hardcover, $20

Family doesn’t have to mean marriage and blood ties. Unconventional connections in a world of tough breaks are at the heart of Wrecker, a page-turner about a group of hippieish individualists living together. The peace-and-love gestalt of the 1960s is reexamined from a fresh angle in this emotionally resonant novel from Taos-based author Summer Wood, who previously wrote Arroyo (Chronicle Books, 2002), and teaches at University of New Mexico–Taos’s Summer Writers’ Conference.

The year is 1969. The place is Northern California’s Lost Coast, in the wilds of rain-soaked Humboldt County, described by Wood as an area “high on the California coast that jutted into the Pacific and sheltered bear and mountain lion in a kind of sleepy, soggy paradise of the ages.” The characters are dropouts who cobble together a collective existence chopping firewood, weaving textiles, farming, and running a local co-op grocery. Into their midst arrives an abandoned three-year-old boy, Wrecker, whose unwed mom has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for dealing drugs in San Francisco, and whose only relative is his Uncle Len, a taciturn logger ill-suited to raising a child. Len’s hippie neighbors take the boy in, each nurturing Wrecker in his or her own way. A motley bunch intent on being true to themselves, they don’t spare Wrecker disappointment, but they raise him with love and compassion.

Wood adeptly switches points of view among a half-dozen characters as she examines their intricate relationships, and redefines and broadens the concept of family. There’s nothing formulaic about this complex novel; it’s a literary exploration of how love breaks us and heals us. Wood makes enthralling use of the lush setting, describing how Len avoids redwoods because “It took more than one man to handle a redwood, and something about the tree spooked him, the big crowns casting the forest floor in a kind of twilight gloom and the wind in the dead branches above sounding like a dry hinge on a barn door.” Then there’s Melody, who awkwardly steps forward to take responsibility for Wrecker: “Melody thought about him every day. Not just about the things he had done but the things he would do. The kind of man he would become. She thought about the way his face opened and closed like a shutter when sorrow or anger or happiness ran across it.”

Characters come and go, government laws threaten, and Wrecker grows up. It’s all told in highly crafted prose that wastes not a word and is infused with sensitive insight. Wrecker is an unforgettable novel.

Wolf Schneider has been editor in chief of the Santa Fean, editor of Living West, and blogs at www.wolfschneiderusa.com.

Thank you, Wolf Schneider.