Fishboy

Fishboy is a throw-away boy, a boy abandoned and reborn in a swamp by the side of a road, who, fleeing the consequences of a murder he believes he has committed, jumps a trawler manned by a crew of renegades. On a voyage replete with ghosts, sea creatures, and the constant threat of dissolution, Fishboy yearns to expiate his guilt by serving his violent shipmates: the captain, a giant called John whose entire body is a cartographical tattoo; the repulsive but wise steersman Mr. Watt, the man turned inside out; the homicidal, knife-wielding Lonny; the boil-plagued cook, haunted by his armless brother.

Seafaring lore finds a macabre new context in this debut novel, a surreal tale of shipboard grotesques in mortal struggle. Protagonist Fishboy, an abandoned child with fish-like eyes and a whistling lisp, shucks mollusks in a squalid cannery where the fishing boats unload their catch. Believing he has killed another worker, he flees to the open sea on a trawler manned by a murderous, deranged crew of outcasts and oddities. As he tries to survive and find a niche among these extreme personalities, Fishboy contemplates his crime and his brief, sorrowful history. Richard, who won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his short story collection, The Ice at the Bottom of the World , renders a vivid, febrile vision wherein the omnipresent sea is both primordial broth and agent of ultimate decay. Steeped in blood, offal and viscera, his characters are scabrous but compelling. His skillful manipulation of prose rhythms and images heightens the immediacy of this odd juxtaposition of nautical legend and mordant, post-nuclear nihilism. Achieving a graceful balance of insight and parody, clarity and hallucination, Richard fashions an imaginative, impressive novel.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The promise of Richard's story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World (which won the 1990 PEN/Hemingway Award) is only fitfully apparent in his surrealistic first novel about a boy and his first sea voyage. He is a reject, this eponymous Fishboy, ``thrown from a car into a side-road swamp.'' He has always done for himself. His home is a box, and his nemesis is Big Miss Magine, an enormous black woman out of a nightmare. He works with fish, hence his name, shucking shellfish, hauling baskets alongside black workers, mostly women, by the shore in the South. He longs to go to sea despite his puny size and effeminate ways. He gets his chance when the crew of a small ship brawl with the fishworkers. Fishboy stabs Big Miss Magine in self-defense, loses consciousness, wakes to find himself on board. This in an ill-omened ship (Fishboy has already seen the ship's cook axed to death) with a crew of criminals and freaks (an idiot, a tattooed giant, an inside-out man); in their company, Fishboy is diminished into just another luckless cabin-boy, without a goal to put some spine into a m‚lange of anecdotes, little fables, riffs on rogue waves and ship's cooks (Richard is oddly fixated on cooks and spit-in-the-soup routines). And the touches of magic realism (the giant's tattoos are a body-map to guide him to the mermaid who saved his life) seem secondhand. Eventually, battered by a rogue wave, Fishboy finds himself back on land, the main ingredient in Big Miss Magine's cooking-pot, his last stop before ghosthood. The transition from short-story to novel has proven difficult for Richard (a story titled ``Fishboy'' appears in his collection); and his incantatory style, thrilling at the start, looks too effortful over the long haul.*justify -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This is a fish story, and although Richard has the credentials (a PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for The Ice at the Bottom of the World , LJ 4/1//89; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1990), this isn't much of a catch. Fishboy is about an abandoned child who lives in the swamps of Louisiana in a "carbonated box," eating fishhead stew "seasoned with pieces of pork gristle Miss Big Magine and her ugly sister had spit from their sandwiches into the weeds." It is full of horrific images, language meant to be lyric and intense and instead simply graphic, obscure, and surreal. It's definitely hard going, and this reviewer suspects that only your most venturesome patrons will want to read past the first page.
- Linda Rome, Middlefield P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.