The Trap Sinister in William Carpenter's The Wooden Nickel

The Wooden Nickel, by William Carpenter, was published in 2002 by Little, Brown and Company, the author's second novel. Deceptively simple and entertaining, this story is not just about Lucky Lunt, a Maine lobsterman with a knack for bad luck, or even about pollution, violence, greed, selfishness, moral depravity, and loss of faith, what Carpenter calls "the maladies of our time." A twenty-first century modulation of literary naturalism, The Wooden Nickel is set apart by its comic use of the mythic mode that obscures an unambiguous vision of darkness. The author peers beneath the sea and looks on the danger and horror lurking there.

Lucky Lunt comes into being in defiance of difficulties and pain, passion, strife, and a thousand other obstructions. He is up to the seat of his Grundens oilskin bib trousers in debt. He has a bad heart that handfuls of pills and sharp thumps on his chest keep from stalling out. He faces problems and obstacles by the boatload. Crass, foul-mouthed, obdurate, self-contradictory, hyper-assertive, impulsive, and uncompunctious, opinionated, xenophobic, with plenty of anger to go around, and at war with just about everything, he still wins our sympathy. We feel for Lucky because the greater the difficulty, the more stubbornly self-reliant he becomes. He will haul lobsters without a sternman or take on the Shag Islanders who encroach on his fishing grounds, alone if he has to. We accept Lucky's opinions. Yuppies are the same as Commies. They all come from out of state. The loran that conks out on board his boat the Wooden Nickel is a "piece of Chinese shit" (290). The government cannot help itself and pisses out welfare every chance it gets, and regulations burden the lobster fishing business so that in four or five years, Lucky says, "guys like me and you won't haul ten christly lobsters in a week" (106). We worry about Lucky. He makes us apprehensive and nervous because he does not sense impending trouble—except if physically threatened or when the Shag Island savages lay traps on the southern drop-off of Toothpick Shoal. We root for Lucky because he is wounded and vulnerable. Surgery for clogged arteries should have slowed him down and made him cautious, but it does not. And finally we laugh at him simply because he is laughable. Self-centered, a slave to instinct, seeing nothing from any perspective but his own—unless he is thinking like a lobster—he is sport for the comic muse. The story has a shadow side, however. Though Lucky seems oblivious to them, the many traps in the novel shape and control his life. As Carpenter tells the story, these traps take on a deadly and sinister meaning. Lucky's fate is bound up with the sea, and the sea is the most treacherous of all the traps.

"Hey mister, what's that all about?" (327), a kid asks after the Wooden Nickel has sunk at sea and the Coast Guard brings Lucky and his pregnant sternlady, Ronette Hannaford, into dock and a waiting ambulance. The Wooden Nickel is about Lucky Lunt who, for thirty years, hauled lobsters off Toothpick Ledge, the family fishing ground for three generations of Lunts, and for Lucky a birthright. Times were good. "Them days we had lobsters knocking on the door asking themselves to dinner. You didn't have to know nothing, any dipshit could make a living" (29), Lucky says. Times were good. But trouble had been brewing. After his shotgun wedding with Sarah Peek, Lucky never broke his stride of "a thousand nights with so many girls he can't remember them" (312). Sexual encounters aboard boat, a killer diet, overweight chain smoker, booze. "He's lived on liquor for forty-eight hours without eating so there was nothing in his body but alcohol, he consumed a bottle of windshield-washer fluid on one cold lonesome drive" (308), the narrator tells us. Within six short months, lobster season from April to October 1997—the time frame of the novel—Lucky's life, already full...