Small Craft Advisory is an enchanting book about Louis Rubin’s obsession with boats and his years of often hilarious boating adventures.
When Louis Rubin was thirteen, he built a leaky little boat and paddled it out to the edge of the ship channel in Charleston, South Carolina, where he felt the inexorable pull of the water. Fifty years and dozens of boats later—sailboats, powerboats, inboards and outboards—the pull is as strong as ever.
In the tradition established by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville, distinguished author and scholar Louis Rubin explores man’s longtime passion for boats. He examines the compulsion that has prompted him and hundreds of thousands of other non-nautical persons to spend so much time, and no small portion of their incomes, on watercraft that they can use only infrequently.
As his new boat (a cabin cruiser made of wood on a workboat hull) is being built, Rubin tells of his past boats and numerous boating disasters and draws a poignant comparison between his two passions: watercraft and the craft of writing.
Anyone who has ever bought and owned a boat—or wondered why people are obsessed by them—will love this amusing, evocative, beautifully crafted memoir by an inveterate boat-owner.
From the vantage of his mid-60s, critic, writer, and retired teacher Rubin (The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree, p. 997) offers a pleasantly rambling memoir about his lifelong romance with boats and about the building of what he suspects will be his last one, the wooden-hulled 24-footer Algonquin. As a young boy in Charleston, S.C., who lived on a river near the sea but couldn't swim a stroke, Rubin tacked together his first leaky skiff and tasted the romance of free movement on the water. Rubin never did learn to swim--a failure about which he's got some typically funny and modestly exploratory things to say--but from that time on he was never without a boat, or far from one. Entering retirement, and having gotten his children through college, he's now able to afford a boat that's an end-of-life equivalent of that childhood skiff--a craft at last that he can design and have built exactly the way he wants it. The result is the sturdy and unpretentious Algonquin, modeled after the harbor workboats that infatuated Rubin as a boy, and her construction from keel up (the boat is named for the publishing company of which Rubin is founder, and also for a coastal liner his father once took passage on) gives the author occasion to reminisce about his lifetime of boats before this one, with conversational side trips into books, places, the meaning of boats and travel, and even--by means of bits of family history that make up some of the most readable pages of this readable book--the psychology of risk-taking and the emotional roots of Rubin's constant but often impractical love of water and boats. Though maybe not casting its lines to quite the same historical breadth as Witold Rybczynski's The Most Beautiful House in the World (1989), this offers itself as a worthy and natural companion to that other andante and evocative memoir of the building of something much loved. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
