Contemporary Authors

• The Boatbuilder - 2018 McSweeney's, San Francisco, CA

• The Rumpus - https://therumpus.net/2018/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-daniel-gumbiner/

  FOLLOW YOUR NOSE: A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL GUMBINER
  BY ANDREW ZINGG

  August 24th, 2018

  Daniel Gumbiner’s debut novel, The Boatbuilder, tells the story of Eli “Berg” Koenigsberg, a twenty-eight year-old “digital refugee” who has recently left behind a job at a San Francisco tech company to pursue a simpler life in the rural coastland of Northern California. Although Berg succeeds at extricating himself from the toxic work environment at Cleanr, he has a harder time ending an addiction to opioids, first prescribed to him after a severe concussion. An apprenticeship with a charismatic boatbuilder, Alejandro, offers an escape. The new job provides Berg satisfaction:

  When he was working with wood he could get outside of himself, escape whatever it was that was dogging him. His mind no longer jumped from place to place.

  In The Boatbuilder, Gumbiner pulls from his biography: growing up in close proximity to West Marin, studying under master boatbuilder Bob Darr, taking opioids after a head injury. He also draws from a wealth of outside research, including long interviews with Darr and extensive study of medical, scientific, and journalistic literature about opioid addiction. The result is a subtle novel that immerses the reader in a world of serene landscapes and eccentric characters.

  In our conversation, Gumbiner and I spoke about how his work as Managing Editor of The Believer informs his writing process and how The Boatbuilder responds to a larger cultural conversation about opioid addiction in America.

  ***

  The Rumpus: What was the genesis of this project?

  Daniel Gumbiner: I was taking a boatbuilding class with a man named Bob Darr, who is a master boatbuilder in Sausalito, because I had a vague interest in the subject and was attracted to the beauty of wooden boats. And the way Bob’s classes work is for the first four hours you do a group lesson with about thirteen people, and then there’s a break for lunch, and then subsequently, for the next four hours, you work on your own individual skills. But, during those lunch hours, everyone would hang out around the wooden table in the shop, and Bob would tell these stories about his time working in Marshall, which is a small town in West Marin, in California. And this is when I first started thinking about the book. Part of it was that Bob was just a really great storyteller, and I loved listening to him tell stories, but another part of it was that he was able to tell stories about Marin County, which is where I grew up, in a way that really captured what was peculiar and unique about it. And it was just very resonant to hear my home described in a kind of mood that felt accurate. I started thinking about wanting to capture the feeling of sitting at that table with Bob and listening to those stories. I wanted to represent that mood in the book.

  Rumpus: Were you writing at the time you took Bob’s class?

  Gumbiner: I wasn’t really working on any fiction at the time. I was writing nonfiction here and there, and I actually wrote a nonfiction story about Bob. His life and his stories definitely serve as a model for the boatbuilder character in the book, Alejandro, although they’re not one-to-one. But Bob’s life itself is very fascinating, and I ended up writing a brief profile of him for California Sunday Magazine. His father was a schooner captain and he grew up on a famous sailboat, Te Vega, traveling between Tahiti and California. In any case, writing that piece was kind of another catalyst for bringing me into the story of this book, in the sense that I had the opportunity to sit down with Bob and speak to him at length about boatbuilding and his life. I recorded some long interviews with him, and those ended up being pretty fundamental to the writing of the book.

  Rumpus: Outside of those extensive interviews and your own experiences learning about boatbuilding, what kind of research went into writing this book, which feels so specific to a particular place? Did you did you live out in West Marin for a time?

  Gumbiner: I didn’t. My brother was living in West Marin while I was writing the book, though, and I’ve always spent a lot of time out there, having grown up nearby in Southern Marin. The thing I did the most research about was actually the opiate stuff, which initially started as a thread that was somewhat tangential to the rest of the work and began to take up more space in the story as it moved forward. I’ve taken opiates, but I’ve never been addicted to opiates. I have had a head injury, like the main character in the book, Berg, and was prescribed opiates for that and so I had some familiarity with that circumstances Berg initially finds himself in. But then the novel goes beyond that experience, into an exploration of what would happen if you were to become addicted.

  I think much of the story is about the idea of chronic pain and dealing with a type of pain that is relentless and won’t go away. What do you do when you are confronting suffering that you cannot relieve? Opiates are a short-term solution to that. That’s the thing about opiates that makes them so dangerous: they work. They relieve your pain. And when you’re dealing with chronic pain, like Berg is, as a result of his post-concussive headaches, all you want is relief from it. And, so if there’s something that really, actually relieves your pain, it’s quite powerful. I mean the potential is already there for abuse because opiates are physically addictive, but there’s even more potential for abuse when you consider the emotional attachment one can develop toward a thing that provides genuine relief from one’s suffering.

  But, when I started the book, the world of addiction was not something I knew anything about, not really. I didn’t know about any of the details of what would happen when a person went to rehab or what it would feel like to be dealing with addiction, so I spent a lot of time researching that. And it was actually quite easy to research in many ways because there’s so much written about it right now. There was a lot of medical, scientific, and journalistic literature out there, and then there were also these oftentimes very poignant, difficult-to-read, first-person narratives of people sharing their stories on the Internet. If you just start poking around on YouTube or on any of these opiate-related forums, the stories abound. And so I spent a lot of time reading about that stuff, and that was all super instructive in terms of having a fuller picture of what it would mean for Berg to actually slip into addiction.

  Rumpus: I did wonder how that larger cultural conversation affected your writing about opioid addiction. Do you see your book as part of a bigger conversation about the opioid crisis?

  Gumbiner: I mean, I think the opiate story is part of a larger story about what it’s like to be an American right now. I think there’s a reason that we, as a culture, become interested in certain drugs. And I think it’s notable that right now we are most attracted to a drug that numbs us, that isolates us, that makes us want to go sit in a room by ourselves. The fact that we desire those things is part of a much bigger story about the conditions of our lives right now and the growing isolation and alienation that comes with living in America in the twenty-first century. We have all these revolutionary communications technologies and we’ve never understood each other less.

  So I think the book is part of that larger story in the sense that it’s trying to explore, on a personal level, these questions of isolation and alienation. But I’m no expert on opiates, and I wasn’t trying to write a comprehensive account in that respect. There is a really amazing comprehensive account by Sam Quinones, called Dreamland, which I really recommend. That book is sort of an encyclopedic look at the crisis on a larger social, cultural level. He looks at the history of how opiates first started getting prescribed and marketed, and he also looks at how black-tar heroin first began to creep into the market, replacing the more expensive prescription opiates.

  Rumpus: I was really drawn in by the novel’s setting, the fictional town of Talinas. I thought it was beautifully rendered. Can you talk a little about how you went about creating that world?

  Gumbiner: In all cases in the book, I really tried to just follow my nose in terms of what I was interested in. When I set out to write a book, I didn’t know how I was going to create the thing I wanted to create. I had to learn it as I was doing it. It’s interesting, I’m working on a new project now, and I feel sort of the same way about it as I felt when I was writing The Boatbuilder—which is that I’m learning about what it is as I make it. And the key, I think, is to keep exploring the things that are interesting to you and to follow your nose. Ultimately, a cumulative picture begins to emerge. And so in the case of setting, I was looking at the aspects of this particular Northern California rural universe, which is obviously infinitely complex, and trying to pay attention to the things that attracted my eye and explore them and think about why I’m interested in them, whether it be a character or an aspect of the landscape.

  Rumpus: The book is filled with so many strange and compelling people, like Garrett and Simon, the odd couple that work at the Yacht Club, and Alejandro, the eccentric boatbuilder. As I read, I wondered how you managed such a large cast of characters. Was there a kind of logic that went into deciding who makes the book and who ultimately gets cut?

  Gumbiner: There was actually a much larger cast of characters in the first draft. When I initially wrote the book, I wrote all of these flashbacks. There were two major things that were different about the book in my first draft. One thing was that I wrote it from both the perspective of Alejandro and the perspective of Berg. In the current version of the book, only Berg’s perspective is there. And I also wrote a number of flashbacks that explored each character’s past in greater detail. But, when I showed that version of the book to my editor, he was like, “I think these flashbacks are obscuring the story you’re trying to tell. You’re covering certain things up about the forward-moving story by flashing back to these past moments.”

  That was really good advice. I went through and removed almost all of the flashbacks and saw that it was true: there were certain aspects of the forward-moving story that were undercooked. And, in that process, I also ended up cutting out a lot of side characters who were related to those flashback narratives. For example, there’s the cult reference. You know, one of the characters, Woody, talks about how half the town used to be in this cult. And, originally, there was this whole flashback story about the cult and the full history of the cult and Alejandro’s interactions with the cult when he was younger. And all that was cut. But then, in the final version of the book, the presence of the cult still hovers in and out of the story. And so I think the process of cutting was useful because it lent a sort of density to the present moment without necessarily bogging the reader down by explaining every single detail of the town’s history to them.

  Rumpus: Does your work as Managing Editor of The Believer inform your writing process? Does that work play a major factor in the way you write or the way you revise?

  Gumbiner: I think so. You wear different hats at different times as a writer. And I think when you’re initially just putting stuff down on paper, you need to take off that more critically-minded hat because it can be stifling if you’re picking everything apart. But then there is a sort of secondary phase, in which you do examine things more critically. I think working as an editor has helped me with that stage of the process. But I think, overall, writing and editing feel like quite different practices to me. The thing that has helped me more and has generally compelled me to get started on fiction projects is working on my own nonfiction writing projects because it gives me a good impetus to just get out in the world and ask people questions and get outside of myself a little bit, which I think is, in part, what makes for good fiction. That was certainly the case in this book. Like I said, I wrote that nonfiction piece about Bob beforehand, and that was definitely a contributing factor into what helped me get started on this project.

  Rumpus: Many of the chapters have a really wonderful episodic quality to them, like when Woody whisks Berg off on an adventure down a manhole. How did you conceive of the novel’s structure?

  Gumbiner: To a certain extent this episodic quality was baked into the early drafts, but in the editing stages, my editor recommended I lean into it even more. He suggested I take a look at Cannery Row, which I had never read. He said my book reminded him of that book and that I should look, in particular, at the way Steinbeck opens and closes chapters. That ended up being really great advice. The way Steinbeck frames his chapters is so masterful and helped me think about certain moments in my book in new and useful ways.

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• Daniel Gumbiner website - https://www.danielgumbiner.com/

  Daniel Gumbiner was born and raised in Northern California. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011 and now lives in Southern Nevada. The Boatbuilder is his first book.

• McSweeney - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interview-with-daniel-gumbiner-author-of-the-boatbuilder

  JUNE 19, 2018
  MCSWEENEY’S BOOKS PREVIEWS
  AN INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL GUMBINER, AUTHOR OF THE BOATBUILDER
  DANIEL GUMBINER AND ROSS SIMONINI

  Ross Simonini spoke with Daniel Gumbiner at Green Apple Books in San Francisco about his debut novel The Boatbuilder (McSweeney’s, 2018), which was recently longlisted for 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. We’re excited to share the transcript of their conversation, condensed and edited for clarity. The audience Q&A that followed will forever be a secret, held and closely guarded between those of us in attendance.

  - - -
  ROSS SIMONINI: Is smelling wood something that’s actually done in the boatbuilding community?

  Daniel Gumbiner's The Boatbuilder follows Eli Koenigsberg, who's never faced a challenge he couldn't push through—until a concussion leaves him with headaches and a weakness for opiates.
  DANIEL GUMBINER: Yeah, that is something that older boatbuilders traditionally knew how to do. That detail actually comes from my boatbuilding teacher, Bob Darr, who I thank at the end of the book. His work in part inspired this book. He could smell a piece of wood and know the moisture content, depending on the species. There are scientific processes for measuring the amount of moisture in a piece of wood, as well, but if you’re working in a shop and need to know, based on how you cut a piece, what the properties are, it’s helpful if you can just smell it.

  RS: Because eventually the wood will change shape and the boat could sink if it warps.

  DG: Yeah, that’s one thing that’s different about wooden boats. Obviously, the tree is not alive, but it was a living thing and its properties will continue to change for a long period of time, depending on the environment it’s in. So it’s something that you have to learn to be aware of. My boatbuilding teacher used to call it wood technology. It’s knowing what wood does, almost like a science.

  RS: At one point, the boatbuilder in your novel remarks on the hardest possible wood they have.

  The brand-new edition Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You—originally published in 2014, in McSweeney's 48—is available now. Now a major motion picture, Sorry to Bother You offers a raucous view...
  DG: Yeah, that’s when they’re trying to hide drugs. That’s not a spoiler.

  RS: So, this book takes place in Talinas, as it’s called, right? And this town is sprinkled with unusual characters, and getting to know the town is an important part of the book. It has a Twin Peaks quality in terms of the characters that come in and out of it. But one thing that I thought was interesting is the way you fictionalize it. I mean, it is — spoiler alert, but it’s Bolinas?

  DG: Yeah, it is and it isn’t.

  RS: What’s interesting is you use both fictional and non-fictional towns in describing its location. So, it’s in Muire County, as opposed to Marin County, but it’s a little bit north of Dillon Beach. Or you’ll mention Pacifica, but then you’ll like change the name of the town of Muire Beach or something. So it’s kind of this half-fantasy version of Bolinas, right?

  Since the 2016 election, reading the news each day can send even the most placid among us into a paralyzing apoplexia. We are enraged, we are bewildered, and then we get nothing done all day. We go...
  DG: Yeah, and I think in part that’s because I wanted to create space to let the story do what it was going to do. I wasn’t necessarily interested in documenting the specific reality of the place. I was more interested in its emotional landscape. And it was helpful to me to not have to feel like I was a camera capturing the exact reality. I was freer to consider the parts of it that I was interested in and move from there.

  RS: Growing up, I remember that whole West Marin area. You and I both grew up in Marin. And I remember that area had a kind of
  mythological quality — we would talk about it. There’s this moment in your book when you say, “Many people in Muire County believed that, if you lived in Talinas long enough, you would inevitably go crazy. They said that, before the town was built, the local indigenous people used the land for ceremonies to communicate with the spirit world. No one was supposed to live there or else they would become part spirit.” I’ve heard that before about Bolinas — that the Miwok people would not go there to live. They would only go there for rituals. And the place is coded in this mythology. Did you feel that way growing up, knowing about Marin?

  DG: Yeah, that detail actually came from my brother. Shout out to David. I never lived in West Marin myself, but my brother lived there. And around the time when I was writing this book, he was living there, so I was spending more time there. I think that in part influenced the setting of the story. But definitely, I spent a lot of time there as a kid and I was always fascinated with the landscape out there and the beauty of that place. So I think it’s something that’s always felt close to my heart and was something I was curious to revisit and look more deeply into in this book.

  RS: There’s something kind of haunting about there that really… Like you said, the whole book you were looking for accessing a mood, a feeling. It really does feel like a place saturated in feeling and mood, especially the fog there all the time.

  Subscribe to the Quarterly and start with Issue 53. Packed in Issue 53's purpose-built ziplock bag are seven stories printed on eight party balloons, which one must blow up to read. Gracing these...
  DG: Yeah, absolutely.

  RS: Another thing that’s going on out there is several ex-Beats or memory of the Beat generation who’ve lived out there. Richard Brautigan, he lived and died out there. The book touches upon the Beats slightly, being in the historical lineage. The Alejandro character has some relationship with a Beat writer. And so the book very much feels as if it’s positioning itself in this tradition of the Beats. Did you feel like you were working in that tradition in any ways?

  DG: I don’t know if I was consciously aware of that but the Beats were important to me as a young person and definitely were formative books for me. What we learn about Alejandro is that he had his own mentor. He’s Berg’s mentor in a way. He has his own mentor — not mentor but close companion — who at some point he severed ties with. And in part, he severed ties with him because he felt he was moving in a direction that was not as compelling to him. He sort of embodies this character that is somewhat Beat-like and who is interested in art and cultivating this persona of an artist. And at a certain point, Alejandro really reacts against that and grows tired of the Beat scene. Part of his story—what we learn about his story—is that this has weighed very heavily on him. That separation and that relationship shows up in different ways throughout the book.

  RS: Do you feel like that Beat sensibility or that history is still present in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Were you aware of that as a kid growing up?

  DG: Yeah, definitely. When I said I was interested in capturing the atmosphere and the emotional landscape of the place, I think that was part of that landscape, for sure. I think those rural communities in Northern California have these rural elements and are agricultural in different ways, but then they’re also, unlike a lot of rural counties in the country, infused with this element of very far-left thinking that is in part, I think, due to groups like the Beats, who moved out there and who were interested in those spaces and going back to the land and that kind of thing. So I was definitely interested in portraying that. I had a boatbuilding teacher myself whose name is Bob Darr. He did this Sunday class that was eight hours long. For the first four hours of the class, we would do a lesson together as a group and the second part of the class you’d work on your own skills. But in between, during the lunch break, he would tell stories and a lot of what he would speak about was his time as a boatbuilder in Marshall, which is a small town in West Marin. And it was so refreshing and interesting to listen to him talk about this time. In part, he was just a very wonderful storyteller but it was also great to hear stories of Marin that resonated with me, and I recognized that I hadn’t heard that kind of story told in a way that felt real to me. So that was the beginning of me starting to think about this book and to think about writing about that place.

  RS: I always associate the Beats with a certain kind of coming-of-age literature. Not all their books are necessarily about that but I think most people, when they read the Beats, are in that age where you’re figuring out your identity and your mind. And this is a coming-of-age book, for sure. I wonder, do you think of it that way?

  DG: Yeah, it’s funny. My friend Tayari Jones was one of the early readers of the book, and she told me she thought it was a different kind of coming-of-age story for a different kind of generation. She said that Berg is not a young man coming of age in the traditional sense. He’s twenty-eight years old. He’s held numerous impressive positions in the working world. He’s done a lot of stuff. And yet, in some way he is spiritually undeveloped. And so, he’s very good at achieving. He’s very good at making things happen for himself in the world, but ultimately, what happens to him is that he encounters this challenge that doesn’t respond to an achievement-oriented mindset. This is his chronic pain that he encounters, with his headaches. As anyone who’s suffered from chronic pain knows there’s always a psychological component to chronic pain. And, in this case, the more he tries to make the pain go away or fix the pain — in the way he’s used to solving problems — the worse it becomes. It doesn’t respond to that. So he needs a new framework for encountering that and moving past it.

  RS: We were talking about how the idea of it being a coming-of-age story, but also about somebody learning this craft of boatbuilding, and the idea that this book is you learning your craft as well as a writer. I’m curious if you have the same kind of relationship you have with Bob Darr about boatbuilding — that same kind of mentorship for writing?

  DG: Yeah, I think I have. One of the things that was important to me in this book was portraying the mentor as someone who was fallible and human and not two-dimensional. I didn’t want the Alejandro character to seem like an oracle of some kind, because when I was younger, I was incredibly disappointed when my mentors revealed themselves to be human beings, which, of course, they always were. But I wanted them to be these perfect, infallible things. And I think that’s in part due to the way we are told stories about mentorship and told stories about teachers and learning and masters of craft or skills of any kind. And so it was really important to me that Alejandro both represent knowledge — because he does have knowledge, and mentors and teachers have been really important in my life, and I wanted to represent that feeling —while also, at the same time, portraying him as a human with all of the normal human frailties.

  RS: And actually, in the passage you read there was the moment when Alejandro talked about the lines of a boat being high art, but then later on he kind of spits on high art — you were saying he thinks that artists are kind of a joke, or at least navel-gazey, right?

  DG: Yeah.

  RS: You go crazy if you move to Bolinas because you’re just focused on yourself.

  DG: Yeah, that’s sort of Alejandro’s criticism of the art world, which is really just a failed criticism of his writer friend who he had a falling out with, Szerbiak. It’s in part a legitimate criticism, but it’s mostly his own hurt at having lost this relationship. He’s kind of looking for flaws, in the way we sometimes look for flaws in people that aren’t actually about the things themselves so much as about the fact that our feelings are hurt. I think Alejandro does have strong opinions about art, and he does have strong opinions about a lot of things, but I think the questioning that we hear from him about the life the artist is really rooted in the collapse of that friendship.

  RS: Do you think about that question? I think a lot of writers especially wrestle with that situation, and it can lead to a state of writer’s block or, you know, just frozen out of fear going forward.

  DG: Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely something I’ve thought about, and I think that’s why it appears in the book. I think it’s inevitable that whatever we’re doing, we ask ourselves why we’re doing it, and that’s sort of the realm of philosophers and rabbis and novels. So it’s one of the things I wanted to ask in this book, and not necessarily answer in any way, but acknowledge as a problem or a question, which is: what motivates us? Why are you doing what you’re doing? And those can be hard questions to answer.

  RS: So why do you think you wrote this book?

  DG: [laughs] I don’t know why I wrote this book. I think it’s… I wish I had a clear answer to that.

  RS: What about writing in general? Do you feel like you have an understanding of why you do that?

  DG: Some element of wanting to communicate or share myself with the world. I don’t know if I have a specific answer as to why I started writing this book beyond the feeling that I was interested in it. And I can’t tell you why I was interested in boats, or why I liked listening to Bob’s stories — you know, the way you don’t know why you like a certain type of ice cream. But, I was, and the more interested I was in it the more I wanted to think about it. That was really one of the wonderful parts of getting to write this book — just getting to totally nerd out about the material that I was writing about and really dig into, whether it was west Marin — I was reading a lot about west Marin, reading the Point Reyes Light, which is the wonderful newspaper that they have up there that actually won a Pulitzer Prize a while back for their reporting on a cult that was in west Marin. Reading about the community, reading about boatbuilding a lot, talking with Bob. I actually wrote a nonfiction piece about Bob before I started writing this book that was more of a direct biography. This book is not a biography — he and Alejandro are not a one-to-one by any means, although Bob’s life is fascinating and someone should write his biography. But over the course of writing that nonfiction piece, I did a number of long interviews with Bob. That was also an enjoyable experience, to have an excuse to sit down and just ask him whatever I wanted to ask him. I think that’s part of the answer to that question, which is that it gave me an excuse to think about these things that I enjoyed thinking about.

• Amazon -

  Daniel Gumbiner was born and raised in Northern California. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011 and now lives in Southern Nevada. The Boatbuilder is his first novel.

A Quiet Novel Seeks Wisdom and Recovery in Craft
John Williams
The New York Times. (July 11, 2018): Arts and Entertainment: pC4(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
Daniel Gumbiner's first novel, ''The Boatbuilder,'' opens with Eli Koenigsberg wedging himself through the window of a Northern California farmhouse to look for prescription painkillers. The sleepy fictional town of Talinas is ''not used to thieves breaking and entering,'' Gumbiner writes, but then Eli (or Berg, as he's known) is not used to thieving.

You might think burglary would provide a heart-racing start to a novel, but Gumbiner quickly establishes a different pace. Berg risks getting caught, but we go slowly alongside him through the house, lingering on the contents of disappointing drawers: ''A seed catalog, lots of photos of boats, two pairs of scissors, a dead black fly.'' We're moving attentively rather than frantically.

Berg eventually happens on a bottle of Lortab pain pills, and takes four. ''Soon, he knew, he would be in love with everything.''

''The Boatbuilder'' offers a decidedly gentle, sometimes quietly rewarding window onto the attempted recovery of an American opioid addict. It's a fictional companion piece of sorts to nonfiction books about self-reliance like Matthew Crawford's ''Shop Class as Soulcraft'' or Alexander Langlands's ''Craeft,'' which argue for the emotional benefits of unplugging and working with your hands. Capturing those interior benefits in fiction is a delicate act, and Gumbiner, the managing editor of The Believer magazine, pins a sense of well-being to the page while other times approaching his themes too explicitly.

Berg has moved to this coastal town from nearby San Francisco. He's waiting for his musician girlfriend, Nell, to return from a tour. He tells himself he's only going to keep getting high until Nell is back, and then it's the straight and narrow for life.

Berg is, as one character calls him, a ''digital refugee.'' For three years, he worked for Cleanr, a start-up antivirus company. Now, at 27, he has ''made it out'' -- his words. His years at Cleanr coincided with the development of his addiction, kicked off while treating a brain injury from a skiing accident.

Berg is one boatbuilder in the book. The other is his teacher, Alejandro Vega, an artisan in his mid-60s who agrees to let Berg work as his apprentice. Alejandro is a hyper-capable autodidact, a former anthropologist who enthusiastically spirals into obscure hobbies, like carving Elizabethan lutes or making portable pasteurizers for his wife to use on the family farm.

Alejandro's business thrives because he and his small staff create wooden boats for a drug dealer named JC, who uses them to transport marijuana from Mexico.

Despite Berg's tangential entanglement with the narcotics trade and

his own struggles with addiction, the book's tensions simmer far more than they boil. Gumbiner is after wisdom, not thrills.

The cast of small-town characters he imagines is like that of a 1990s indie movie; a compliment, in this case. The place and its people are convincingly alive. There's Woody, whose conversational gambits include explaining why he's not ''addicted'' to Six Flags. (''I have a passion for the place. That I will grant you.'') Residents look forward to an event at which a local man will exhibit ''50 years of his bobcat photography.''

There are dueling bodies of knowledge in this novel. One comprises the grim specifics of getting high and getting clean, and the tricks of both. In rehab, Berg recalls, he was given ''Clonidine, Baclofen, Meloxicam and Gabapentin; 50 mg Seroquel or 100 mg Trazodone to help him sleep.'' And much more besides. Once he's clean, getting high is easier and better, because his tolerance has been lowered.

Set against this are the pleasures of making things by hand and looking more closely at the natural world: Berg learns how to level a chisel, and to know the rates at which various species of wood dry.

There is a Shaker-like modesty to this novel's aims, and like all such art, it has a high degree of difficulty. Spare and spiritually inflected is not an easy goal. ''The Boatbuilder'' does often radiate a sense of calm. It also has a few underdeveloped loose ends, including Alejandro's vague but apparently important relationship with a dead writer named Szerbiak. Berg's religious background -- his grandfather was an esteemed rabbi -- is broached but not lengthily explored.

Ultimately, Gumbiner succeeds and stumbles relative to how much he trusts the reader to understand what he's after without diagramming it.

Alejandro ''wanted people to have an intimate relationship with their own environment. The problem, he said, was that people had become too dissociated from the circumstances and conditions of their immediate surroundings.'' This thesis statement is overly familiar. ''Many people have written about this,'' Alejandro concedes at one point, and it's true. Which certainly doesn't mean that others, including Gumbiner, shouldn't. But some ideas in this novel would resonate more loudly if they had gone without saying.

''It's nice to do things right,'' Alejandro tells Berg at one point. ''You do this one little thing right, in this moment, you fix this one little thing, and then you think, Maybe I can fix my life.'' Well, yes.

The same point is made to far greater effect at more subtle moments, when Gumbiner imagines Berg's confidence-building steps into a new kind of living. Early in the novel, after he finishes constructing a small coop for an injured chicken, he swells at his modest accomplishment. ''It was all out of proportion with what he had done,'' Gumbiner writes, ''but it was a nice feeling.''

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The BoatbuilderBy Daniel Gumbiner237 pages. McSweeney's. Paper, $18.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: Daniel Gumbiner (PHOTOGRAPH BY WHITNEY FREEDMAN)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Williams, John. "A Quiet Novel Seeks Wisdom and Recovery in Craft." New York Times, 11 July 2018, p. C4(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546147293/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=208bb3a3. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A546147293

The Boatbuilder
Kathy Sexton
Booklist. 114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p50.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Boatbuilder. By Daniel Gumbiner. May 2018.240p. McSweeney's, paper, $20 (9781944211554).

Gumbiner's first novel is a coming-of-age story that captures the disaffection of a twenty-something who feels lost in the world. Eli "Berg" Koenigsberg had a bright future after college until a serious concussion left him with an opiate addiction. In yet another attempt to fight it, Berg moves to a small town in Northern California but is soon breaking into homes to find his next high. While working on a charter boat, he meets Alejandro, an eccentric boatbuilder with an obsessive and inquisitive nature. Berg becomes Alejandro's apprentice and finds the job's physical labor and steep learning curve to be curatives for his addiction. Even more important, Alejandro's wisdom, work ethic, and endless curiosity show him new ways to deal with his pain. A testament to Gumbiner's fine writing, readers will easily slip into Berg's day-to-day existence; Gumbiner relays Berg's ambivalence, desperation, and anxiety without resorting to over-the-top scenarios or dialogue. He allows his characters and small-town setting to shine in this beautiful novel about finding one's place, no matter how small, in the world.--Kathy Sexton

YA: Older teen readers of literary fiction might identify with Berg. KS.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "The Boatbuilder." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956856/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5834b39a. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956856