Book review: “The Seaplane on Final Approach,' a coming-of-age novel set in a wilderness lodge near Kodiak, entertains and explores human nature with an engaging narrator.
In this dark but somehow still quite funny novel, Rebecca Rukeyser, who lives in Germany but grew up in California and spent several summers working in Alaska, creates the life and personalities associated with a wilderness lodge on an island near Kodiak. There, three young women just out of high school work alongside the lodge owners and an old man named Chef.
The smallness of the world she’s entered is comforting to Mira, a troubled teenager whose “ferocity was leveled at becoming.” In a long background section near the beginning, we learn that Mira had been sent the summer before to stay with a “marvelous” aunt at her Kodiak cabin. On that visit, Mira became enamored of a particular fisherman and began a fantasy life surrounding him.
There is never too much mystery, though. Mira interrupts her own story at frequent intervals to speak from the future, as her adult self who teaches English in foreign countries. “Later,” she tells us, “I met a lot of people like Chef” — comparing him to some who taught in foreign countries because it was impossible for them to go home. And “years later,” when she “was hemmed in in a crowded bar in Beijing,” she repeats a cliché that Maureen always used to say.
Such descriptions are not only precise but rendered in the narrator’s particular, often peculiar, way of seeing and understanding. “… by the time the Germans came there was fireweed on the graying hillsides, and the bioluminescence had left the water, and the salmon were beginning to peel in the rivers, strips coming off them like off a roast chicken.”
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