‘Cloud Nine’ sentimentalized Maine story by New Yorker

CLOUD NINE, by Luanne Rice, Bantam Books, New York, 323 pages, hardcover, $19.95.

From the outset of New York City resident Luanne Rice’s novel Cloud Nine, we’re in familiar territory: a sentimentalized Maine story, penned by someone from away.

First, there’s this tiny island off the Maine Coast. Islands are such handy plotting devices that their appearance in fiction is always suspect, but this one also injects the story’s first false note for those of us who’ve spent real time around Maine’s real estate: It’s called Elk Island. Not Gull Island, Long Island, Egg Island, Hardwood Island, Sheep Island, or any of the other well-worn monikers that appear and reappear throughout nautical charts of the Maine Coast. Elk? In Maine?

Okay, Elk Island it is. Now, populate a drafty but quaint Elk Island farmhouse with George Talbot, a curmudgeon of a widowed farmer, and his also-widowed sister Bess, who has a penchant for leaving her teeth out for informal occasions. Add George’s rebellious teen-age grandson Mike. He’s come home to his roots, and to learn about his long-dead lobsterman father, because he’s disenchanted with mainland life in upstate New York.

Oh yes, and — because sheep farming in Maine, which no longer affords a livelihood for native folk, has become the province of fabric artists, organic farmers, and other latecomers — populate the farm instead with an indeterminate number of doomed geese, destined for restaurant freezers and luxury bedding shops. You may scratch your head over the notion of goose farming as a viable agricultural option Down East, but I promise you’ll never feel the same about that cozy down comforter again.

Dress up the novel’s setting with more standard-issue props: a barnacled old island lobster dealer who’ll weight the scales with his shears and send you all-male lobsters for your family feast if you don’t look sharp, a resident bald eagle, and a quaint nondenominational island chapel with standard-issue pictureque gravestones.

Got the picture? OK, unless you need to pause for some insulin, bring on the two dysfunctional off-island families whose emotional wounds (divorce, desertion, betrayal, and untimely deaths) just happen to match up like Tab A and Slot B. There’s Elk Island native Sarah Talbot, daughter of the curmudgeon widower: As the novel opens, this thirtysomething single mom is in remission from a predatory brain tumor, running a specialty shop that sells quilts (stuffed with Elk Island goose down) in a New York college town, and trying to reconnect with the son who’s returned to the Maine island that she couldn’t leave fast enough after her mother died there of cancer. Then there’s Will Burke, a divorced former Navy flyer, now a licensed civilian pilot. He and his asthmatic teen-age daughter Susan are still trying to recover from the drowning death of Susan’s brother.

Put all these folks on that oddly-named island for Thanksgiving weekend. Add an early-season snowstorm (that, at least, is realistic). Thicken the plot with several pinches of outrageous coincidence and one of the fastest, most dramatic cancer relapses in medical history. Then sit back while the story achieves its inevitable lump-in-the-throat outcome.

An occasional true-to-life insight saves this journey from being an unrelieved series of cliches.

Rice’s two adolescent characters sometimes do seem truly part of the uncomfortable world of kids, overinformed in some ways, naive in other ways. (Never mind the cute touch of their discovery that they’ve been to the same psychiatrist.) Effusive descriptions of the Maine island’s postcard beauty are tempered by Sarah’s telling Will, “Island life … there’s no future.” And in the lobster dinner that winds up the fateful Thanksgiving weekend, Rice evokes the sinking feeling we’ve all experienced as the mood of a family feast collapses under the weight of one member’s destructive temper.

In case you haven’t guessed by now, there are good reasons to find this book irritating. I succeeded in not liking it much, down to about the last 50 of its 323 pages. Then, done in by Cloud Nine’s relentless barrage of sentiment and my own stubborn belief in redemption and the transcendence of love, I finished the novel weeping at the kitchen counter, while supper quietly burned on the stove.

Just a minute, though. A few tissues and a deep breath later, I’m bound to say that Rice’s book is what a cynical previous editor of mine used to term “a long run for a short slide.” In other words, although a good cry may be cathartic, there are easier (and quicker) ways to achieve one than slogging through 275 pages of predictable contrivance.