The Wooden Sea
November 30th, 2003by Jonathan Carroll
ISBN: 0765300133
Carroll’s book is weird, compelling, and often funny as hell.
It concerns Frannie McCabe, former violent teen loser and present-day chief of police in a small town in New York. He isn’t a corrupt abuser of power: he grew up and became a nice guy.
That isn’t the most surprising or amazing thing that happens in the novel, either. There is time travel, aliens, a four hundred year old dog that won’t stay dead, a synthetic feather, a guy who only eats three things and one of them is a Mars bar, and tancretic spredge, just to name some of the more out-there elements. Carroll mostly pulls off a delicate balancing act: wacky circumstances that practically beg disbelief on one side, nuances of stepparenthood and second marriages on the other.
I haven’t read Carroll before, and I understand he has a bit of a cult following. If his other books are anything like this one — mixing the everyday and the absurd in a blender — I can see why, as that is the sort of thing that tends to inspire a following. I was expecting Carroll to give me more by the end of the book than he did. Not that I want everything tied up in a neat package (loose strings are often more believable) but I could have used a clearer look at the bigger picture in this book. God is more of a tease than anything else here; he gets talked about, even prayed to, but never really puts in an appearance or gets explained as well as the other characters do.
Carroll’s casual but not careless narration, the sense that anything could happen, and characters I grew to care about all outweigh the bit of disappointment at the end of the book. I would recommend this to anyone looking for something different to read, and I’ll be looking for another of Carroll’s books.
December 7th, 2003 at 7:52 am
Your sense of ‘expecting Carroll to give me more by the end of the book than he did’ echoes my own reactions to his novels. I always love the setups, the complications and absurdities and character quirks that pull me in, but just when I’m wondering, ‘How on Earth is he going to pull this all together?’, he doesn’t. When I finished The Land of Laughs I was ready to go to Carroll’s house and whack him over the head with his own novel. Still, I like his imagine enough that I keep finding myself willing to give him more chances.