The Highest Tide

Jim Lynch

There is a tradition that authors write a "coming of age" novel as a first book. This is something that a writer is supposed to get out of his system before getting on with the real work of writing literary fiction. The Highest Tide is Jim Lynch's coming of age novel. It is also a first class work of literary fiction.

Lynch's protagonist is Miles O'Malley, a thirteen year old boy who has a business, picking up sea stars, sand dollars and clams at low tide, in Skookumchuck Bay, near Olympia Washington, and selling them to aquariums, collectors and restaurants. He is also a voracious reader of books on marine biology and the shortest kid in his class. He has a crush on an older girl who used to be his babysitter and is now a punkish rock bass player and singer with a substance abuse problem and bipolar disorder.

The novel employs a kind of Pacific Northwest version of magical realism. Miles sets it up early wth this bit of narrative, "I learned early on that if you tell people what you see at low tide they'll think you're exaggerating or lying when you're actually just explaining strange and wonderful things as clearly as you can." Miles discovers a giant squid washed up on a mud flat and left, still alive, by the receding tide, then a rare deep ocean fish. Soon a major survey of it's marine life is ordered and all kinds of unusual sea creatures from all overt the world are being discovered in Skookumchuck Bay. Miles becomes the object of a media feeding frenzy, the leader of a new age "cult" uses him for her own aggrandizement and people begin to visit the bay to cure their ills by rubbing mud on themselves.

Through this mass of magic, media hype and marine biology there run threads in which Miles learns about love, sex, death, friendship, betrayal, courage, cowardice, honesty, dishonesty, success and failure. That's the "coming of age" part. Lynch also throws in an earthquake and a massive flood tide.

The only thing I didn't like about The Highest Tide is that it is a much shorter book than his second novel, Border Songs.

Border Songs

Jim Lynch

Brandon Vanderkool, the protagonist of Border Songs, has some of the symptoms of Asbergers Syndrome. He's six foot eight inches tall, a birder and an artist. He works for the border patrol along a section of the border between Washington State an British Colombia. He lives on the dairy farm where he grew up, with his parents and can look from there across the ditch which marks the border, to the home of the father of the Canadian girl that he is in love with. She is in the marijuana smuggling business.

Jim Lynch describes Brandon as dislexic, but I see borderline autism in his social ineptitude, his amazing attention to detail, his difficulty with filtering out stimuli. Because he must pay attention to everything at once, in detail, he "accidentally" captures smugglers, illegal aliens and terrorist suspects that others in the border patrol don't see. He also takes time in the middle of his work day to build giant bird's nests and release strings of sewn together leaves floating down a stream. Brandon paints portraits of all the people he catches crossing the border illegally. The characters in Border Songs are complex, well rounded and surprising. Brandon's mother is in the early stages of Alzheimers. His father has building a sailboat in a barn on the farm for years but he is running out of money. Wayne Rousseau smokes pot to help control the symptoms of MS. He also paints copies of Picasso's last painting and reinvents the light bulb, for the experience. Madeline Rousseau wants out of the drug business and becomes more and more entangled in it day by day.

There are several plot threads running through the book: Brandon's BP adventures, Brandon's art, Norm's troubles with the dairy farm and his sailboat, the pot growing and smuggling business, Wayne Rousseau's experiential experiments, Sophie Winslow's documentary film making or massage business or whatever it is she is really doing here anyhow, the ineptitude of the United States government. All of these themes are woven together in a way that makes the basic boy meets girl plot work very well indeed.

Border Songs is character driven. Each of these people becomes a real person that you want to know. What are these people like, rather than what happens next, is what kept my interest, reading late at night, when I had to get up to go to work in the morning. Be careful about that.