Books: Tijuana Straits by Kem Nunn

Border disputes

By John Ziebell

After 20 years of crafting brilliant novels that range stylistically from cosmic to comic to truly creepy, Kem Nunn has somehow inherited the particularly Californian appellative of "noir writer." I'm not really sure what that term means anymore or whether it truly applies to Nunn, who walks more in the footsteps of Steinbeck than Chandler; but wherever he's slotted by the kind of people whose cataloguing follows the path of least resistance, his latest work, Tijuana Straits, is another powerful book from a unique and compassionate craftsman.

Nunn is a native of the Golden State and he's drawn to the pockets of wildness that remain within its boundaries: the desolate northern coastline, the Mojave and now Tijuana Slough, the corner of real estate where the U.S.-Mexican border runs into the Pacific. The area is ironic by its very nature, protected as a wetlands though the stream coursing through it to the sea, the Tijuana River, delivers not fresh water but the dregs of the maquiladora corridor, the human effluent and industrial poisons that the border residents of both countries, in the interest of promoting a better NAFTA, work very hard to ignore.

Nunn's best works--Tapping the Source and The Dogs of Winter--are also "about" surfing, and, again, the practice here carries more allegorical than expository weight. The same holds true for the novel's setting. Borders are historically home to corruption, violent crime and marginalized souls, an environment rooted in chaos; the area's other main businesses, the illegal transportation of drugs and people, render the Tijuana River Valley basically a no man's land with transient control continually changing hands among its tribal warlords--narcotics smugglers, traffickers in human beings and the Border Patrol.

Nunn is a Californian, not a Los Angeleno, and it's this broader, untamed landscape that provides the backdrop for the violent, unpredictable collision of three disparate lives. Sam "The Gull" Fahey, a former world-class surfer who lost his peak years to a felony dope-smuggling conviction, now raises worms on a small farm he inherited from his father. It is Fahey who inadvertently rescues Mexican environmental activist Magdalena Rivera, half his age and on the run after an attempt on her life. For reasons that aren't clear to her, she's being pursued by a chilling thug named Armando Santoya; he's a man driven by cultural paranoia, his brain ravaged by a sociopathic cocktail of commercial toxins and recreational narcotics, a victim for whom all the ecological sins of the border became manifested in the birth of his terribly deformed child.

Nunn's protagonist Fahey is a reluctant hero, a recluse with a tainted track record, a man who believes he betrayed his true gift and has come to accept life as simply a way of marking time. He's slow to explore his own past, hoarding both the good and bad events that have forged his disinterested fatalist's perspective, and this is a true measure of artfulness on Nunn's part; Fahey's character gains greater depth and credibility with every imperfection he reveals, slowly taking on shape as if moving into focus from the murky coastal fog.

In terms of craft, Nunn can turn out evocative prose with the best of them, especially when he's detailing the natural world qualified by a culturally specific tang, like an evening "...shot through with a delicate beauty, the great dome of the sky going from some deep shade of midnight blue in the east to ashes of rose over the black and craggy shapes of the Coronado Islands--an airbrush job of epic proportions, hot rod art writ large as if Big Daddy Roth had been permitted some say in it." His real genius, however, lies not in the fact that he writes some good sentences--most serious writers do--but that he never writes a bad one, an attribute found far too infrequently in these days and times.