An advantaged middle-class kid from Indiana shares misadventures with slackers and sociopaths on the road to finding purpose and a sense of self-worth.
“Strip search, jump suit, interrogation: I got through that okay,” says Nathan Lochmueller, the quasi-picaresque protagonist of Brian Kimberling’s first novel, Snapper. Arrested and slapped in the city slammer of Bloomington, Ind., as an accessory to his even more inebriated friend John, who absconded after serially assaulting a parking meter with a two-by-six, Nathan wants you to know that he rather enjoyed slumming in the jail’s day room with Banjo, Ice Dawg and other permanent inmates who were smoking weed and playing D&D at 7:00 a.m. One of them dubbed him Cool Hand Luke. “He had done me a huge favor. You don’t choose your own prison name,” observed Nathan, striving to be wise and cynical beyond his years.
This plainly autobiographical novel is a species of travelogue-memoir covering Nathan’s peregrinations from his childhood into his 30s. Kimberling’s vignettes afford him angles for (only sometimes) clever commentary on the absurdity of human existence and (somewhat more often) touching revelations of his flickering inner spirit.
The author introduces a large supporting cast of slackers and sociopaths who share misadventures with the hero as he searches for a sense of self-worth and purpose. Nathan’s caring father is a tenured professor, and his equally devoted mother is a church organist, but Nathan has no moorings, except for an abiding connection to birds and wildlife. “I was going to be a philosopher,” the young man confides. “The university had one, and he spent most of his time buying drinks for flouncy co-eds. That was probably the best career plan I ever had. Ecology and songbird decline came later. Philosophy might have been more cheerful, because at least it is already dead.”
Nathan has massive resentments and disappointments for someone with his advantages, and the narcissistic combination becomes tedious early in a short book. The resentments revolve around being from pathetic Indiana, “the bastard son of the Midwest,” and particularly from Evansville, “Indiana’s snot-nosed stepchild,” a Hoosier homeland in which everyone is a “redneck, lowlife, loser [or] bumpkin.” The disappointments revolve around his love for Lola, a smart and fetching girl who has fetched for herself in the course of having five stepfathers and at least that many concurrent lovers in addition to Nathan. She ultimately marries someone else who promises success and stability, leaving Nathan to his ennui.
This is all (somehow) connected back to the formative incident giving rise to the book’s title. The maladjusted lowbrow kid who will become “Fast Eddie” of the infamous burger joint with the gimmick promotions of “Ass Wednesdays” and “Thong Thursdays,” convinces Nathan and his best friend Shane to truss up an alligator snapper they’ve caught in their rowboat in a stripper pit in Indiana’s former coal mining country, resulting in Shane’s severed thumb falling to the floor of the boat, and Nathan fainting. ”Maybe you should have used your other thumb,” Nathan jokes with Shane after the latter hitchhikes across the state for a reunion weekend some years down the road, accepting dangerous rides from a sex predator and a jolly raconteur three-quarters into a bottle of Dark Eyes. They spend the visit vainly seeking enlightenment and redemption by smoking banana peels.
Nathan’s salvation, and the salvation of the book, lies in the bizarre accidents that bring him employment as a songbird nest finder for the Fish and Wildlife Service, honing the skills of a woodsman who could track his flycatchers, buntings and wood thrushes purely by trigonometry and sound. Then, after a stoned and demented roommate shoves him down a flight of marble Post Office steps, leaving him mostly deaf in one ear, Nathan is steered by an odd-duck FWS friend to a raptor rehabilitation center in Vermont, “the only work I was cut out for.”
At the hawk hospital, Nathan also fortuitously meets Annie, a charming, centered, financially secure English divorcée, who helps him forget about Lola and forgive his native state some of its offenses against humanity. “I write ‘falconer’ on my tax return now, and I should make senior falconer any day,” Nathan proudly announces. At the modestly heartwarming conclusion of the story, back home in Indiana, after pregnant Annie (bearing a child to be named after Shane of the reattached thumb) is rescued from a bad fall in a creek bed in Nathan’s old songbird territory, the father-to-be suppresses his rage against Hoosier drivers that wouldn’t stop to lend a hand. “Oh, people. My people,” says Nathan, embracing his origins, his identity and his future.
Donald A. Carr is an environmental lawyer, a birder and the author of a forthcoming biography of Elliot Richardson.