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In Matt Riordan’s debut novel, a college student in need of quick money finds work on an Alaskan fishing boat in the unforgiving Bering Sea.
<Even at the ragged edge of civilization, some lines should not be crossed.<
Everyone believes Adam to be something he’s not. Sometimes that’s because he’s told them a story. Sometimes he’s told himself one. But when Adam joins an Alaskan fishing crew that’s promising quick money, the dangerous work and harsh lifestyle strip away all fabrications and force a dark-hearted exploration of who he really is.
On the unforgiving Bering Sea, Adam finds the adventure and authenticity of a fisherman’s life revelatory. The labor required to seize bounty from the ocean invigorates him, and the often crude comradery accompanies a welcome, hard-earned wisdom. But when a strike threatens the entire season and violence stalks the waves, Adam is thrust into a struggle for survival at the edge of the world, where evolutionary and social forces collide for outcomes beyond anyone’s control.
In his riveting debut novel, Matt Riordan pairs personal experiences with a master storyteller’s eye in a piercing examination of the quest for identity in the face of tempests within and without.
Auteur
Matt Riordan grew up in Michigan but spent his early twenties working on commercial fishing boats in Alaska. After college, Matt drifted from commercial fishing through a variety of jobs before landing in law school. He then became a litigator in New York City, where he practiced for twenty years. He now lives with his family in Australia.
Texte du rabat
"An upmarket debut about a college student who works an Alaskan fishing boat to earn money for tuition only to engage in a dark-hearted exploration of a harsh industry and wilderness"--
Échantillon de lecture
Adam was looking for a red-haired man. The fleet superintendent said that Nash had red hair, couldn’t be missed. He said Nash was different. He didn’t say from what.
 
Adam walked the dirt road from the cannery office down to the river. Everywhere that wasn’t road was snow or tundra. Tundra turned out to be a carpet of mud-colored sponge, half-filled with frigid water. It exhaled puffs of vegetable rot when Adam stepped on it. Brown and red patches poked through retreating snow cover, making for a shaggy calico landscape. The superintendent had also used the word beach, but beach was not what Adam found when he got to the edge of the land, where gritty mud dissolved into the swirling brown water of the wide Nushagak River. He watched the river and gave serious consideration to the idea that he might be in the wrong place.
 
He was waiting on a red-haired man, and a red-haired man was  exactly what came into view, but still Adam was a little surprised that someone in this place was looking for him. Two men in an aluminum skiff appeared, and as the skiff got closer, Adam saw that the man in the front had red hair. From the time he first spotted them the skiff kept on over the water, right at him, for a solid twenty seconds. A solid twenty seconds is a long time to think. 
 
Adam waved. Nash looked dead at him but didn’t wave back. He stepped up on the seat before the skiff reached the shore. When it slid up on the gravel he jumped and hit the ground at a trot without removing his hands from the pockets of his hoodie. He was about Adam’s height, just shy of six feet, but wiry. Nash closed the distance between them. He had a stripe of freckles across his cheeks, and his nose changed its angle of descent just below the eyes. You could see how the skin would hang when he got old. As described, he had long red hair, pulled back in a ponytail and tucked through the back of his baseball cap. Adam started to introduce himself, but Nash interrupted him. 
 
“You’re Adam,” he said. “The boyfriend.” 
 
Adam put a smile on his face but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have a girlfriend, but he avoided giving information away for no good reason. He knew Nash was talking about Betsy. 
 
“Yeah. That’s me.” 
 
Nash was sizing him up. That didn’t concern Adam. He would observe, work hard, and do whatever was required to obscure the difference between them and him. Making himself unobtrusive was a skill he had cultivated for as long as he could remember, for so long now that he acquired speech patterns and gestures almost as a reflex. He considered the process a kind of adaptation to obstacles, rather than performance of a fundamental deceit. He had done this before. More than once. He counted it a strength.
 
 
Nash patted around in his jacket until he found cigarettes. “I’m Nash,” he said. “Kaid tells me you never been fishing before. Totally green.” Adam had never spoken to Kaid. All of his phone calls had been with a Neptune Seafoods employee sitting at a desk in Seattle. 
 
“Well—” 
 
Nash was lighting up. He spoke with the cigarette in his lips. “I’m not talking about sports fishing. That’s teasing animals for fun. I’m talking about seining, gillnetting, crabbing, long-lining—any way you catch fish for money. You done any of that?” 
 
Adam didn’t answer. From Betsy’s dorm room in Massachusetts this plan had seemed outlandish, but it had the degree of fuck you in it that the situation seemed to demand. He would show up back at school in September to pay his tuition not with a check from his parents or a grant or some other reward for compliant citizenship. No, he would lay down cash he had squeezed out of the wilderness on his own terms. Cash earned killing fish. Fuck you. But standing in the melting muck, the fuck you part of the plan evaporated, leaving only a job he knew nothing about. Looking at this place, talking to this man, he was reminded that every tale he had ever heard of ripe-for-the-taking riches also featured gangs of the foolhardy suffering a lethal comeuppance. This comported more or less with Adam’s sense of the moral universe, in which stupid was always punished more harshly than evil. 
 
“I was hoping for somebody bigger,” said Nash. 
 
Adam stood up straight. 
 
“Not saying you’re small, but you’re not the deck ape I was looking for either. Kaid said you were an athlete, and I was thinking lineman. Well, you are going to have to do. I’m the skipper on this trip, but it’s Kaid’s boat. I’m guessing you don’t know anything about Kaid.” 
 
Nash poked Adam’s lacrosse bag with the toe of his boot. It was full of brand-new waterproof gear and a pair of deck boots that Adam had bought in town, significantly depleting his meager cash reserve. 
 
“So, you have any experience at all?” 
 
“I’ve never worked on a commercial fishing vessel,” Adam said.
 
“Vessel?” Nash shook his head. “Listen, chief, around here, it’s a fucking boat.” Nash took a step back. “So, you don’t know anything about this? Nothing at all?” 
 
“I’m sure I can learn,” said Adam. 
 
“Christ,” said Nash. “Fucking Kaid. You know what, right here I’m going to do you a solid, so listen close. As of this afternoon they’re pulling green herring out of Togiak, so I really got no time to go hunting up another man, but somebody ought to warn you. The truth is th…