If adherence to chronology and narrative clarity are important to your reading enjoyment, this book's not for you. Joseph Dane, a Mainer born and bred, now a medievalist at UCLA who summers (and sails) in Maine, near where he grew up, tells his stories "athwart."
His method is to circle around tales of his youth and loves, conflating past and present. He "fiddles with" the many versions of what he remembers: his first job selling chickens to rich summer folk, including the Bush family on Walker's Point at Kennebunk; a summer "fishing" for lobsters on Casco Bay; the death of his dog, put down by his father without telling him; the beautiful and steely Linda Jane who cuckolds him. And who is Linda Jane -- his seminar classmate at the Rare Book School in Virginia, or the barely literate working girl who misspells the words her rough fingertips trace upon his back?
This is an evasive work that seems deliberately to throw us off kilter, as Dane slips in tantalizing bits about the gin bottles his father hides in the basement or about the cupful of his own bloody urine he takes to the ER. Dane tells the very kind of "meandering and duplicitous stories" he ascribes to his father, a well-known Bowdoin professor of the classics. But his descriptions of sailing, its conditions and accoutrements are precise: "The front and back are bow and stern. Facing the bow from the stern, the left side of the boat is port and the right is starboard." He is masterful in describing the many kinds of fogs that obscure Maine's upper rocky coast, and we can exactly chart his course as he makes his way in his traditional sloop from Muscongus Bay to anchor in the sand of Pemaquid Beach.
In the book's "parallel histories" of the boat and Linda Jane(s), Dane repeatedly testifies to the intractability, the unreliability of memory: "My memories of Route 1 began to merge with memories of driving up Route 1 thinking of earlier drives up Route 1, and I lost all recollection of where the dance hall was." Was it in Woolwich or Wiscasset or Waldoboro?
One of the many pleasures in this book is seeing Dane puncture pretension, whether it's the "bourgeois complacencies" of his hated grandmother or the tourists "playing Maine" as they try to emulate the stalwart locals. Another is his retelling of Maine lore, including the story of the military man who begged to be shot because he was being eaten by dogfish.
Dane's memoir is ultimately an elegy to lost youth: If you stick with it, you'll be amply rewarded with glimpses into the musings of a capacious mind.
Kathryn Lang is former senior editor at Southern Methodist University Press, where she acquired award-winning works of fiction and creative nonfiction for nearly 20 years. Her great-aunts lived on Sebago Lake in rural Maine, where "a-yuh" was part of the family lexicon.
