THE LOWERING DAYS

A novel of place, myth, and clashing loyalties set in 1980s Penobscot, Maine.

Shortly after a team of Japanese investors visits a local paper mill with an eye toward reopening it, a 14-year-old member of the Penobscot Nation burns the building to the ground and disappears. The act sows discord through the economically challenged region. Enraged by the loss of prospective jobs, some demand swift vengeance for the perpetrator. Others, like the narrator’s mother, Falon Ames, who runs a local newspaper, argue that the event must be seen in its larger context; the mill, after all, had hardly been “an innocent victim”; its former owners had “knowingly discharged toxic chemicals and wastewater products…into the river, poisoning its fish and plants.” This dichotomy—between a mystical appreciation for the natural world and the environmentally extractive nature of work and industry—pervades Brown’s beautiful if uneven debut. While the arsonist and her father struggle to survive off the land as fugitives, Penobscot Bay lobsterman Lyman Creel inaugurates a parallel land-industry drama: Convinced that un-fished waters are wasted waters, Lyman lays his traps in the mouth of the Penobscot River, an act of overreach (the river rights belong to the Penobscot Nation) that helps motivate the narrator and his twin brother to begin sabotaging Lyman’s traps. Like many debuts, Brown’s first novel is imperfect. His dialogue sometimes veers toward preciousness at the expense of character development; his characters are often too accurately aware of the wider themes that shape their lives (“Some places are like portals to eternity,” says the narrator’s uncle. “You stand in them and look around, and you feel how long and unending the world is. You become a part of something beyond time. Maybe this is one of those places”); and the plot moves through increasingly convenient contortions as it hurtles toward its foreseeable crescendo. Yet despite these shortcomings, Brown tells a gripping tale. And in his hands the Penobscot region of the 1980s and '90s—with its eccentric cast of Vietnam veterans, hippy fugitives, gruff lobstermen, and Penobscot tribal members—comes wonderfully to life.

Mystical, gripping, rooted in the land—Brown may bang a little too hard on the keys, but he plays a compelling tune.