SEA ROOM

A French-American lobstering family on the coast of Buck Harbor, Maine, weathers WWII and the loss of one of its sea-loving menfolk—in a workmanlike, heavily nostalgic, over-the-generations first novel.

The Dupuy clan, consisting of chain-smoking grandfather Pip (Hippolyte), Brylcreamed son Gil, and his ten-year-old only child, Jordi, motor off on their Zabet et Lydie and dream of someday building a spectacular lobster boat together. Their women—grandmother and scold Nana; compliant wife and mother Lydie—stay home to pray and bake blueberry pies. A few short months after President Roosevelt’s yacht, Potomac, on its way to the leader’s retreat on Campobello Island, stops in the harbor to fetch ice cream from a local vendor, Pearl Harbor is attacked. Along with the rest of the town, Gil enlists. Years of waiting, listening to radio newscasts, and living off cryptic, irregular letters from the front ensue as the dynamics among the remaining Dupuy tribe shift: Pip and Jordi enjoy long hours on their boat while keeping alive the dream of fashioning their own vessel in Gil’s honor; Nana takes maniacal refuge in her Catholic religion; and Lydie fraternizes suspiciously with the local rogue, Virgil Blount. The outcome is neither startling nor completely predictable, though the envious, leechy-eyed Blount is much too villainous to be convincing. Through his letters, Gil, now a celebrated medic, demonstrates how the war changes him—that is, he can now find “sea room” or “enough room to make personal choices so that you aren’t stuck like a boat in a wind storm.” Indeed, Gautreau sets out a goodly number of honey jars as sentimental traps for his readers, and in the end it’s as hard to dislike his debut novel as it is to turn off Tom Brokaw.

An adequately handled throwback that will awaken the sympathy of a certain generation.