NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST Kem Nunn’s “surf noir” classic is a thrilling plunge into the seedy underbelly of a Southern California beach town–the inspiration for the film Point Break. People go to Huntington Beach in search of the endless parties, the ultimate highs, and the perfect waves. Ike Tucker has come to look for his missing sister and for the three men who may have murdered her. In … men who may have murdered her. In that place of gilded surfers and sun-bleached blonds, Ike’s search takes him on a journey through a twisted world of crazed Vietnam vets, sadistic surfers, drug dealers, and mysterious seducers. He looks into the shadows and finds parties that drift toward pointless violence, joyless vacations, and highs you may never come down from…and a sea of old hatreds and dreams gone bad. And if he’s not careful, his is a journey from which he will never return.
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Surf noir has been around about as long as surfing has been in the popular mind — for one, Ross Macdonald dipped a toe in it in 1962 — and its current strongest practitioner is Don Winslow, whose works I’ve reviewed in the past. But Kem Nunn was working this wave before Winslow paddled in, and Tapping the Source is the first of his six widely-spaced novels. It exhibits many of the characteristics of a debut: uniqueness, passion, but also issues with pacing and plot resolution.
A wayward mother dumped Ike, our eighteen-year-old protagonist (it’s hard to call him a hero), in a dead-end desert town. He and sister Ellen grew up longing to go elsewhere, which Ellen eventually did, falling off the map in the process. Then news from Out West sends Ike to Surf City USA, looking for the only person in the world whom he really cares for. He finds that all is not Jan and Dean on the edge of the Pacific.
Ike — quiet, suspicious, shy, self-conscious, naïve — is vividly drawn. By his nature he’s hard to cozy up to, and in many places you’ll want to hit him with a clue stick, but that’s a function of who he is. He reacts to events in the way you might expect a closed-in kid might, which doesn’t always make a lot of sense and isn’t always in his best interest. Nunn avoided the trap of making him an investigative adept, natural-born hustler, or quick study; he’s a plodder in a milieu that eats up plodders without a thought.
That milieu is the Huntington Beach, California of 1984, before redevelopment and gentrification wiped out the beach slum, erased the jagged edges and made Surf City safe for rich suburbanites. The HB we see through Ike’s eyes is a festering pit of losers, druggies, lost children, mad dogs, gangs (motorcycle and otherwise), and the two-bit businesses that feed off them. Nunn’s scene-setting is atmospheric and easily visualized, and most of the supporting cast members are clearly defined and true to their types. Preston and Hound — the yin-and-yang natural forces who try to lay claim on Ike’s soul — are both fully realized characters who could easily carry their own stories.
So why not five stars? As mentioned earlier, Ike is true to his nature, but his nature isn’t especially dynamic, and as a result he spends a good deal of time drifting. No doubt a real Ike would do the same, but his lack of drive robs an already prolonged Act II of the energy it needs. You’ll guess the supporting cast’s secrets much sooner than Ike does, which robs them of their impact. Baddie Milo Drax is much typeier than the other major characters; his daddy is Blofeld, and his siblings are all the other slick-entrepreneurs-with-hearts-of-slime that we’ve seen on TV and in books and films over the past thirty years. While the much-maligned climax makes a certain topical sense — in 1984, Manson still cast a long shadow over the Southland, and serial killers were all the thing — if reader comprehension is the author’s major goal, it’s truly unhelpful to have his POV character stoned as well as generally clueless.
Tapping the Source is a good book that could have been great but for Nunn’s rookie mistakes. I hope to read one of his later works to see how he’s developed as a writer. This has been called one of the great California crime novels. That may overstate the case, but it’s a moody, atmospheric evocation of Southern California surf culture before the developers paved it over. Just expect to respect it more than you enjoy it or are thrilled by it.