THE WIDTH OF THE SEA

A New England town’s dying fishing industry clashes and converges with tourism and drug trafficking in this tale of fishermen who’ve fallen from grace with the sea.

The tide is definitely out for the town of Rosaline, where most people have relied on commercial fishing for generations. Now the waters have been overfished and a group of investors seeks to turn Rosaline into a tourist attraction as an old fishing port. Chalfoun (Roustabout, 1996) finely delineates her protagonists, with the up-in-arms townspeople providing choric support to members of the intertwined Fitz and Albin families. John Fitz and Chris Albin are childhood friends who fish off a boat belonging to John’s father. John’s lover is Yve, Chris’s younger sister, and Yve’s best friend is Kate Albin, Chris’s wife. The hitch in this cozy circle is that Chris is a junkie, and he’s only reliable when out at sea—and then only when John doles out his stash to him. Soon they find their loyalties to each other and their way of life tested when a crew of sailors arrives with a wreck of a schooner that, after renovation, will be Rosaline’s showpiece tourist attraction. While the sailors, and a few townspeople, set about to restore the schooner, Yve takes a job as their cook—resulting in the usual tensions. The real drama here, though, unfolds after a federal bureaucrat lays out the no-fishing regulations and offers the fishermen a buyout for their boats. Unfortunately, the Fitzes are mortgaged to the hilt and the buyout will only benefit their creditors, but Chris has a plan. In a dialogue with echoes of the Grand Inquisitor about it, he persuades John to convince his father to use their boat for heroin smuggling. And that’s when things really go awry.

The climax and coda are a bit cinematic, but that doesn’t mar a fine story of men and women on the outskirts of the information society.