The Nature of Things

"I don't have a plan," Elvis volunteers. "I just have a feel. Trying to get a better understanding of myself. The mistakes I make always come back around.  Truth is like the sun, isn't it?  You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away." That snippet from a conversation between Roger Morgan and Elvis Presley in September 1962 gives Jim Lynch's novel its title and is a quick summation of the plot. Indeed, it could be the summation of the plot of many novels and many lives. The mistakes that we make always seem to come back around, often when we least expect them. The place is Seattle. The novel switches back and forth between the time of the World's Fair that took place there in 1962 and the year 2001, a time of other momentous events. The man most responsible for the Fair's success was Roger Morgan, the mastermind of it all. It was an event that transformed the city from a sleepy outpost of the past to a place that embraced the futu...

The Highest Tide was Jim Lynch's first novel, published in 2005. Earlier this year, I read his second novel, Border Songs , and absolutely loved it. The earlier novel isn't quite on a par with that one but it is still a very good book. Lynch seems to have a feel for oddball characters like the savant Border Patrol officer in his second novel. In this first book, his main character is a 13-year-old genius who is in love with the sea and Rachel Carson and his neighbor and former babysitter Angie Stegner, in that order. First and above everything though is his love for the sea. His knowledge of what lives there seems as big as the sea itself and when he starts discovering strange creatures in the Sound near his Olympia, Washington home, the world starts to take notice of little Miles O'Malley. He becomes a reluctant celebrity in his coming-of-age summer. This book feels like an homage to Rachel Carson. Miles has memorized long passages from her book, The Sea Around Us ...

I just finished reading a wonderful book, Border Songs by Jim Lynch. Have you read it? If not, put it on your "to be read" list. It is a terrific book. The story is set along the border between Washington and British Columbia and concerns a unique Border Patrol agent named Brandon Vanderkool. Brandon is a 6'8" tall dyslexic, borderline autistic, birder who is so finely attuned to Nature that he notices everything . This quality, it turns out, makes him a very successful BP agent. He catches smugglers and illegal entrants to the country without even trying, without even really wanting to, just because he can't help noticing all the tiny clues that betray them. Around this central character, Lynch has woven a lyrical story about life along the border, about dairy farmers and pot growers, a Canadian and American community threatened by America's paranoia about terrorism, about outsiders and people searching for love and belonging, and people just trying to...