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" Michelsen's characters are vivid and down-to-earth; his prose is both potent and elegant; and his novel, grappling as it does with the issues of addiction, self-destructive anger, overdevelopment and ecological destruction, and the smothering of small businesses by large corporations, is a multi-layered story of destruction and rebirth that fuses the personal and the political." (starred review)—Booklist
A Cape Cod commercial fisherman comes to grips with the destruction of both his trade and his environment.
Caught between the increasingly industrialized fishing business and the relentless development of his native Cape Cod, Ollie Cahoon, thirty-six and working a dragger out of Chatham, Massachusetts, feels ever more adrift both at sea and on land. In a desperate effort to compete with the huge, mechanized boats of large-scale fisheries, Ollie goes deeply into debt, yet still finds himself fishing the "hard bottom" rock- and debris-strewn beds avoided by larger boats.
When his mate Pig leaves for more lucrative work, Ollie reluctantly hires his brother-in-law, whose innocent but costly mistake only adds to Ollie's troubles. On shore, Ollie faces the disintegration of his marriage and separation from his young son. On top of everything else, Ollie has become the town pariah, since his refusal to sell water rights to land he owns stands in the way of a discount mall that may save the town's faltering economy. Beaten down by his financial, marital, and legal burdens, Ollie is slowly but inexorably driven toward a final desperate stand.
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G. F. Michelsen, a prolific novelist and journalist, has taught writing at NYU and Hunter College. He has also worked as a seaman and officer on coastal freighters in northern Europe; commanded fishing boats out of Falmouth, Chatham, and Sandwich, Massachusetts; and performed numerous blue-collar jobs. The recipient of an NEA fellowship in fiction, Michelsen is the author of To Sleep With Ghosts: A Novel of Africa (1992).
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