Night Fisher

R. Kikuo Johnson

I'm probably rating this slightly lower than I should thanks not to the boko itself, but to other reviews. Yeah, yeah, I know, that makes me a bad person. But really, I keep seeing stuff like Booklist's "...a coming-of-age story that avoids the pitfalls of the type" and Kirkus' "...avoids cliché...." I have to wonder what these folks were reading, as the entire novel is based on one big cliché.(Which is really why it only got three stars, you see).

Loren is your typical nerd-- quiet, bookish, without a lot of friends. His father packed them up and moved them from Boston to Maui five years previously, and Loren still feels like an outcast. His best friend, Shane, has been distant for a while now, and Loren evidently makes up his mind (it's a rather abrupt, and odd, character reversal) to seek Shane out and do what it takes to win his way back into Shane's affections. What it takes is crystal meth. You know where this is going, don't you?

Of course you do-- it's the cliché on which the book's whole dramatic force turns. One cannot try drugs without destroying one's entire life. The second Loren lays a hand on a drug, you can map out the rest of the story; the only surprise is where Johnson chooses to end it. (And it's a nice surprise, showing a fine grasp of the mutability of narrative structure, as does Johnson's all-too-infrequent cutting to a relevant part of one of Loren's textbooks.)

With the exception of this particular lapse in critical judgment, though, everything else they're saying about the book is right on. It's quite nicely drawn, the characters are relatively complex, and despite the fact that you've seen this journey at least a million times between The Lost Weekendand now, Johnson does at least manage to keep the pages turning by making his characters likable and his situations amusingly absurd. So if you can get past the "all drugs in any concentration will destroy your life" myth so painfully flogged on the surface of this dead horse, you may find some palatable meat within.