Under the surface Author Carpenter undermines Maine stereotypes in new novel

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Five years ago, William Carpenter had anchored his sailboat in a calm cove off the coast of Maine. His family was onboard and they were enjoying a festive outdoor meal with another family. It was one of those glory days of summer, luxurious and quiet and windswept.

At the time, Carpenter, a writer and longtime professor at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, was struggling with his second novel. He had been collecting scenes and characters from coastal life, but was unable to lock onto the central voice for the story. The day of the picnic, he had an epiphany. It came when a lobster boat charged onto the scene and motored close enough to shoot a powerful wave of water toward Carpenter’s boat. The meal was upset and the impact popped a cleat from Carpenter’s boat. He was livid, but within a week Carpenter had the voice for his novel “The Wooden Nickel.”

“Imagine the class anger he must have felt,” said Carpenter, speaking of the anonymous captain of the lobster boat. “He must have thought that we were rich instead of two struggling teachers. I was furious at the time but now I see it as a great gift. So much was given to me in that moment.”

Most Maine novelists, at some point or another, think about writing a story set in Maine. Region, after all, long has been a central element in American literature, and Maine’s poetic landscapes and seascapes have a natural, as well as fashionable, allure for the literary artist. That said, Maine also has suffered from oddly nostalgic depictions of Yankee toughness, summer rusticators, rural half-wits and noble savages.

“The Wooden Nickel” – Carpenter’s first to be set in Maine – eschews nostalgia at every turn. The central character, Lucas “Lucky” Lunt, is a salty lobsterman whose boat is called the Wooden Nickel. His wife is a fledgling sea-glass artist. Their daughter flirts with upward mobility by falling in love with a rich, from-away boy and making plans for college. Their son is a dangerously defiant adolescent.

The backdrop is Orphan Point, the fictional coastal town in which the story takes place. It has a central diner with a lusty waitress, a busy town dock run by the lusty waitress’s miserly husband, and tensions that run deep and dirty. Add pickup trucks, country music, cans of beer, a pregnant sternwoman, wealthy summer people and a scene in which a family’s vacation picnic is toppled when their sailboat gets hammered by a class-raging lobsterman. This is no “wish you were here” postcard.

Best known for penetrating prose poetry and an inspirational teaching style, Carpenter is part craftsman, part trickster. He abhors the sentimental literary device that smacks of cuteness. “The Wooden Nickel” smacks all right. It takes a sugar-free look at territorial fishing rights, family dysfunction and encroaching globalization.

Regular readers of his poetry as well as his students know Carpenter has a talent for gracefully drawing readers in and then shifting tracks. In the introduction to Carpenter’s collection of poetry, “Rain,” winner of the national Morse Poetry Prize in 1985, the eminent poet Maxine Kumin described Carpenter’s voice as “determinedly absurdist, making his leaps.” A former student of his, Josie Sigler, said what attracted her to Carpenter was “his ability to take a real situation in a poem and all of a sudden you fall through this trap door and everything changes. He can grind you down into reality with a few humble details and then pop you into another world. He’s a powerful experience.”

It’s not that “The Wooden Nickel,” published by Little, Brown and Co., promises one thing and then delivers something else. Carpenter is too subtle for that. The cover of the book, a creamy silhouetted shot of a sole lobster boat in a calm bay, may be misleading. But from the first page, Carpenter employs hard-driving language and, with Lucky, an in-your-face protagonist whose favorite word begins with F.

Lucky’s story, charged with Maine vernacular, straddles contemporary themes and at the same time gazes back to classic struggles of literature: man against himself (at 46, Lucky’s heart and his marriage are failing), man against man (he competes with lobstermen, an Asian businessman and suitors to the women in his life), and man against nature (he takes on an oceanic threat by the end of the novel). Carpenter, a longtime sailor, researched the book in the harbors, at the boatyards and on the docks of Penobscot Bay, where he lives in an old coastal inn with writer Donna Gold and their son Daniel.

“I didn’t want to write about stereotypical Maine,” said Carpenter last winter over lunch in a Bucksport diner. “I wanted to write a sea story that was universally valid. I didn’t want to mock the Maine coast. If anything, I respect it and see it in heroic terms. I hope this book is an active rebellion against Maine being quaint.”

Carpenter is as fit in his 60s, one suspects, as he was in his 40s. He’s a hiker, a cross-country skier, an outdoorsman. His hair is professorially wispy. His eyes, which are wildly blue, can dart from place to place, and you get the feeling there isn’t much those eyes miss. While Carpenter ate fish and chips and drank half a dozen cups of coffee, he talked about his background. He was born in Cambridge, Mass., where his father, James Carpenter, taught art. When Carpenter was 9, the family moved to Waterville, where the elder Carpenter joined the faculty at Colby College and distinguished himself as chairman of the art department.

After attending public high school, Carpenter studied English at Dartmouth College, where he graduated in 1962, and went on to earn a doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1967. By the 1970s, a roiling time in American colleges, Carpenter was teaching at the University of Chicago. Discouraged with the academic institutional system and eager to engage in a community of like-minded progressive intellectuals, he responded to an ad in the Maine Times. An alternative school of higher education with a focus on ecology was forming in Bar Harbor, and Carpenter proposed that he head up the humanities division. That was 1972.

Since then, Carpenter has published several books of poetry that cemented his reputation as a prose poet and keen interpreter of art and life. One collection – “Speaking Fire at Stones,” published by Maine’s Tilbury House – is a collaboration with artist Robert Shetterly. “What he did with that book is what people should do with art,” said Shetterly, who lives in Brooksville. “Time has been stopped in a painting. In order for the painting to live, it has to be opened again in an imaginative way. It has to be given time again. And Bill did that.”

In 1994, Carpenter published his first novel, “A Keeper of Sheep,” and his work has appeared in many literary magazines. Other poets and teachers are quick to credit him with bolstering poetry in the state – with independent projects, readings and a democratic teaching style that captures the attention of young writers.

“Bill is sensationally creative,” said Steve Katona, president of COA and a Harvard-trained biologist who arrived in Bar Harbor the same year as Carpenter. “The reality he sees is more interesting than the reality most people see because of the colors he lends to it. He does this in his writing and in his classes. But fundamental to his contribution is a very deep and unflagging commitment to academic rigor and quality. He has a first-class, rigorous mind.”

Carpenter was on the team that built COA into a respected liberal arts college that trains students in the interdisciplinary field of human ecology. He’s a senior faculty member there now, and takes off summer and fall to write. His classes – among them “The Aesthetics of Violence,” “The Eye and the Poet” and “The Fifties,” which he team-teaches with his colleague and former wife, art historian and artist JoAnne Carpenter (with whom he has a 30-year-old son, Matthew) – are some of the most popular courses on campus and have given him a cult status among students.

“Bill has a following of students he has brought along as poets and fiction writers,” said arts writer and educator Carl Little. As former director of communications at COA, Little sometimes sat in on Carpenter’s classes. “As a veteran of graduate school writing classes, I’d be tougher. He’s not. He’s understanding. He knows how to bring people along without injuring them. I am a huge admirer of his teaching style. It’s a dialogue. It’s careful and thoughtful. I don’t think he ever lost the radicalism of the 1960s. When I wanted to be reminded of what College of the Atlantic was all about, I’d go talk to him”

Little also is among the substantial nonstudent cadre that admires Carpenter’s poetry, which, he added, is “every bit as good as Billy Collins.” It’s not unusual in discussions of Carpenter’s work to hear the names William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Flannery O’Connor and Annie Proulx.

But there’s another hefty name that’s likely to hover in the ether above “The Wooden Nickel.”

“You could use the word Melville with this book,” said Sylvester Pollet, a poet and an associate editor with the National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine. Pollet, who also captains a sailboat during the summer, was a year ahead of Carpenter at Dartmouth and the two have participated in poetry readings together through the years. “His teaching, his whole focus at COA has been mythological, out of Jung and archetypal analysis. So when he starts talking about boats and whales, he’s got ‘Moby Dick’ in mind. He’s got all that going on underneath.”

In the book’s most cinematic scene, Lucky does, indeed, take on a whale. He is 20 miles off the coast, battling with the large animal and facing the breakdown of technology. But Lucky himself is a whale of a person, large, instinctive, forceful and courageous:

The fog’s shutting down again by the time he’s at the waypoint. He has to close in to a tenth of a mile, then four hundredths, than all of a sudden the thing’s right under them wallowing in a wave trough off to port. The head is up. It’s putting out a high wheezy spout like an old man blowing his f— nose. He hits the shift in to neutral and puts the rifle up. He follows the top of it with the flip sight like a deer hunter looking for a neck or shoulder shot.

By the end, the intrepid Lucky prevails but water floods the boat carrying him and his girlfriend. It’s late in the novel and Lucky already has been tested beyond what he thought were his limits. In a signature Carpenter move, not everything gets tied up neatly, though an unexpected tenderness closes the book.

During the course of our lunch, Carpenter related a number of personal stories that slipped through his consciousness while creating “The Wooden Nickel.” One was about the accidental death of his father and sister, who drowned in a riptide 10 years ago in Puerto Rico. While Carpenter speaks openly about the family tragedy, the scene in the book moves beyond personal history and into a heightened mythic quality akin to “Moby Dick.” Ultimately, Carpenter was interested in unveiling Lucky as a symbol of tradition scraping against technology. “The world is changing, Lucas, the old boundaries are coming down,” one of Lucky’s rivals says in the book.

“The lobstermen around Lucky are taking their place in the middle class but he feels betrayed by his lobster gang and that puts him in the place of the outlaw,” said Carpenter, whose grandfather was a saltwater fishing guide. “He’s antique – his thinking, his technology. He’s all-American and retro and disciplined in that. He’s a renegade. The challenge is to see how unredeemable you can make a character and then redeem him.”

This spring, Carpenter returned for a second meeting to the same restaurant, with the same fish and chips and coffee. Donna Gold was there this time, too, and they discussed the household provenance of “The Wooden Nickel,” which she read as an early draft. Or, rather, she heard since Carpenter, whose writing studio is an old camper parked in the driveway, followed her around their Stockton Springs house reading it aloud.

“I hated and hated and hated Lucky,” Gold confessed. “And then, I didn’t. I’m not sure why I like Lucky by the end of the novel, except you know he really cares and that he says so much of what he feels. He lets it all out. And that’s powerful.”

The process is one many readers may go through. To fully understand Lucky or even to accept him, you have to stick with him until the end. And even then, he’s a confounding character.

“It’s satire,” said Pollet. “All of these characters are, at times, worse than they could possibly be. That’s the genius of it. Bill will have an outrageous scene that goes over the top or is goofy, but then he makes you care about Lucky. You end up caring about all the characters. I think, finally, this is a love story.”

But Carpenter knows there’s a risk involved in creating a character that is un-PC, having him fall in love with a younger woman and insult nearly everyone in the community around him.

“I think some will be impatient with Lucky,” said Carpenter. “But I actually set out to challenge them. The book really does bang on you. It’s raw. And I intend that to get where I want to go: under the stereotype, especially the male stereotype.”

Now that “The Wooden Nickel” is out – and receiving favorable reviews such as Carolyn Chute’s comment that Carpenter is “ferociously, magnificently, and absolutely fearless “- Carpenter is onto the next project, a war novel about mothers and children in the 1940s. He is interviewing his 93-year-old mother for material. He hasn’t forsaken poetry, he said, but for now the longer works are holding his attention.

“I miss poetry,” Carpenter said. “But I hope you can get further in a novel. It’s the form of our time.”

William Carpenter will sign “The Wooden Nickel” at the following locations:

Signing and reading, 7-9 p.m. April 18 at Blum Gallery, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor.

Signing, 1 p.m. April 20, Reading Corner, Rockland.

Signing , 7 p.m. April 24, Books, Etc., Portland.

Signing, 7 p.m. April 26, Bookland, Cook’s Corner, Brunswick

Signing, 1 p.m. April 27 at the Fisherman’s Festival, Sherman’s Book & Stationery Store, Boothbay Harbor.

Signing, 7 p.m. May 8, Nonesuch Books, So. Portland.