Tapping the Source (Signed First Edition)

Kem Nunn

ISBN 10: 0385292724 / ISBN 13: 9780385292726

Published by Delacorte [Press], New York, 1984

About this Item

First Edition. SIGNED by the author on the title page. Author's first book, a seminal surf mystery, and a National Book Award finalist. Near Fine in a Near Fine dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 168531

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Tapping the Source (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Delacorte [Press], New York
• Publication Date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385292724
• ISBN 13: 9780385292726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Dust Jacket Condition: dj
• Signed: Signed
• Seller catalogs:
  • Mystery and Crime
  • Author's First Book
  • Surfing

About this title

Synopsis

Ike Tucker, desperately searching for his sister Ellen who has disappeared, finds himself attracted to the same tough trio of surfers who appear to be responsible for his sister's disappearance

Review

If you aren't already familiar with Kem Nunn's 1984 novel Tapping the Source, or if the idea of a "classic surfing novel" makes you either chuckle or shudder, be prepared to realign your literary biases. This is not a story of gilded surfers and sun-bleached blonds, of insouciant days and moonlit nights on the beach; instead, Nunn has crafted a darkly pensive meditation on solitude and desire. Ike Tucker is the quintessential loner, trapped by both circumstance and inclination in a California desert town, abandoned first by his mother and then by his sister, Ellen, who fled, in turn, toward the promise of the coast. His awareness of his own alienation, rendered in prose that is always elegant and often poignant, is haunting:

As he listened the train sounds grew faint and disappeared and someone shut off the music so there was just the silence, that special kind of silence that comes to the desert, and he knew that if he waited there would come a time, stars fading, slim band of light creeping on the horizon, when the silence would grow until it was unbearable, until it was as if the land itself were about to break it, to give up some secret of its own.

The secret, though, comes not from the desert but from the sea. Propelled by a mysterious rumor of his sister's murder, Ike enters the surfing mecca of Huntington Beach, whose bright façade conceals shadowy violence and joyless violation. Wistfully intent on understanding the men who might have killed his sister, Ike abandons himself to the hypnotic allure of the ocean: "The tide was low and the waves turned crisp black faces toward the shore while trails of mist rose from their feathering lips in the golden sun." Nunn's language effortlessly reflects Ike's desires and fears; the novel spirals gracefully into the young man's eventual immersion in the surfing culture and riffs on the terrifying ease with which that immersion becomes overwhelming. Although a murder may lie at the heart of the narrative, the novel is far more an exploration of character than of suspect and motive--and that exploration is infinitely rewarding. --Kelly Flynn