`Stern Men’ Gilbert’s island tale> Coming-of-age fiction has Maine setting

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STERN MEN, Elizabeth Gilbert, Houghton Mifflin, May 2000, Hardcover, 304 pages, $24. Written with a pungent sense of language, “Stern Men” is set in the 1970s on the fictitious Maine islands of Fort Niles and Courne Haven — described by the author as “two old…
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STERN MEN, Elizabeth Gilbert, Houghton Mifflin, May 2000, Hardcover, 304 pages, $24.

Written with a pungent sense of language, “Stern Men” is set in the 1970s on the fictitious Maine islands of Fort Niles and Courne Haven — described by the author as “two old bastards in a staring contest.”

A history of the settlement of the two islands gets the book off to a slow start. Adding this information throughout the text a little at a time would improve the pace of the story. Liberal doses of lobster fishing lore keep the pace slow, too.

I was a third of way through the book before I figured out “Stern Men” is the coming-of-age story of Ruth Thomas. Ruth’s father, Stan, is a lobster fisherman. Her grandfather Lanford Ellis is the rich summer resident whose family owns the granite quarries on the islands. Ruth, at 18, is trying to figure out how she does or does not fit into complex and eccentric island culture.

When I met the character Rhonda Pommeroy, who serves as a surrogate mother to Ruth, I began to be pulled into the story. I especially enjoyed this description of Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy’s relationship:

“Mr. Pommeroy might suck on a single strand of Mrs. Pommeroy’s hair as if it were sweet licorice. Sometimes they’d sit quietly together for hours, she knitting woolen garments, he knitting heads for his lobster traps, a bottle of rum on the floor between them from which they both drank. After Mrs. Pommeroy had been drinking for a while, she liked to swing her legs up off the floor, press her feet against her husband’s side and say, `Feet on you.’ … Rhonda Pommeroy was a true beauty … She wore long skirts, and she lifted them when she walked, as if she imagined herself fancy in Atlanta.”

Rhonda and the other eccentric characters who people “Stern Men” are, in the beginning, more interesting than Ruth. But when Ruth returns to Fort Niles after boarding school in Delaware, the story takes off and author Gilbert’s quirky character sketching is delightful. In this scene, Rhonda gives ugly Mr. Cobb a haircut:

“Her hands were constantly at work on his hair. Even when she wasn’t cutting, she was stroking his head, fingering his hair, patting him, tugging his ears. He leaned his head back into her hands like a cat rubbing against a favorite person’s legs. … Mr. Cobb stood up, still admiring himself in the antique mirror. … He turned his head slowly from side to side and smiled at himself, grinning like a handsome devil.”

Ruth spends the summer trying to figure out what to do with her life, intent on resisting her grandfather’s efforts to send her to college. She toys with the idea of going to work as a stern man on a lobster boat — hauling traps, filling bait bags, and doing all the other cold, wet, smelly, slimy work. She receives no encouragement from her father. No one will hire her, anyway, and risk offending Stan. Far smaller infractions have resulted in lobster wars. Lobstering, the author states in the prologue, “is a mean business and makes for mean men.”

Ruth’s mother, Mary, has lived away from Stan for many years, at the Ellis family’s New Hampshire mansion where she tends to Ruth’s retarded brother and a dingy old lady, Aunt Vera Ellis. Mary’s life is thoroughly controlled by Lanford and Vera Ellis, a fate Ruth is determined to escape.

Ruth drifts through the summer in the company of an old man, Sen. Addams, who fears the water and is the only man on the island who’s not a lobster fisherman. The senator is fascinated by sea disasters and longs to start a natural history museum on the island.

He hopes to convince Lanford Ellis to let him use an old granite company warehouse for his artifacts, some dredged from the mud flats by one of Rhonda’s many sons, the shriveled and shy Webster, who has an uncanny talent for finding things in the mud.

Just when Ruth feels that her only choice is to give in to her grandfather’s wishes and leave the island, she meets Owney Wishnell of Courne Haven, an immensely quiet man with a genius for finding lobster.

Ruth’s dilemma of what to do with her life pivots on her attraction to Owney and on an event that ought to ruin her life. At that point in the book I was firmly caught up in the story and couldn’t wait to find out if Addams gets his museum, if Lanford Ellis retains control over Ruth’s life, and if Rhonda and her goofy sisters ever get the kitchen painted lobster buoy green.

Readers who like Cathie Pelletier’s Matagash novels will like “Stern Men.” Readers who admire Carolyn Chute’s facile ear for Maine idiom and offbeat humor will like it, too. Something about the good-hearted tone of the book reminds me also of Van Reid’s novels.

Elizabeth Gilbert, who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, reportedly knew little about Maine when she began work on “Stern Men.” Her previous work dealt primarily with the West and her fascination with cowboys.

But a friend who had grown up on a Maine island told her that if she wanted to write about hard-as-nails Americans, she ought to look to Maine. Gilbert spent three years making trips to Matinicus, Long Island and Vinalhaven in all seasons. She worked on lobster boats and got to know fishermen.

Gilbert’s first book, “Pilgrims,” was a finalist for the PEN-Hemingway Award and won Best First Fiction awards from the Paris Review, the Southern Review, and Ploughshares.

She works as a writer-at-large for GQ and covers the “offbeat beat” writing about subcultures.


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