Kem Nunn

Interviewed by Brian Ritterspak

When the great Robert Stone (author of Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise) calls a book "A profound study of skill, courage and the human psyche", the savvy reader takes note. Kem Nunn's The Dogs of Winter, his new book, is being received as his finest yet. Heart Attacks is California's last secret spot - the premier mysto surf haunt, the stuff of rumour and legend. Down and out photographer, Jack Fletcher, hitches up with surfing legend, Drew Harmon, active men past their prime, formerly heroic figures still trying to catch the perfect wave. Harmon's wife, Kendra is on an obsessive search of her own to find the murderer of a local girl. Quests converge and events play themselves out in ways that are both inevitable and surprising.

"As if Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy had teamed up to write a surf novel", said the Village Voice, and the Washington Post enthused "There is probably not an American novelist working today who is better at choreographing and describing physical action. The most accomplished practitioner of Californian noir writing today and the principal heir to the tradition of Chandler and Nathaniel West."

Kem Nunn lives in Northern California and is also the author of Pomona Queen, Unassigned Territory and Tapping the Source (published by No Exit), which was nominated for the American Book Award's Best First Fiction.

Talking about his extraordinary new novel, Kem Nunn thinks movie makers might have trouble with what he calls his "gnostic surf fable." But not because the book lacks for gripping plot. The Dogs of Winter has enough story to keep a reader on the edge of his seat for days on end. "The thing that will be tough for Hollywood types," says Nunn, "will be figuring out who the hero is." There is Drew Harmon, the legendary surfer who comes out of middle-age retirement to attempt the huge, cold waves at Heart Attacks, a secret spot on Indian land along the Northern California coast. Harmon's obsession and heroic stature are part of the book's central mystery, and his quest sets off a tragic chain of events. But Nunn thinks Harmon may be "too dark; nobody will want to play him. "And Jack Fletcher, an ageing surf photographer who hopes at the outset to recapture the party days of his youth but ends up knowing something about responsibility and recompense, may not be "two-fisted enough for Hollywood." Then there is Kendra Harmon, Drew's young wife. She's kidnapped in revenge for Harmon's trespass, endures, then triumphs in a grim sort of way; but Nunn thinks it will be a rare actress who will wish to fill that difficult part. "So you have this built-in problem," he says. Nunn has worked off and on as a screenwriter since he sold the movie rights to his highly acclaimed first novel, Tapping the Source. He has a sense of these things.

But Hollywood might have other problems translating this stunning novel to film. First there is the tone of the book. It is a book of big, dark moods. It has about it an electric gloom, part of which has to do with crimes and obsessions, and part with the vivid portraits of the decaying reservations and lumber towns and the cold, cloudy, jagged coastal landscape of Northern California. But most of which has to do with the hard specificity and sombre music of Nunn's prose.

Then there is the fact that the book is a novel of ideas. It may not actually matter for one's reading pleasure that the evil deeds that befall Kendra in the gloom of the forest hearken back to the first American storytelling genre -- the captivity narrative. But once Nunn announces that this ordeal arises in part from his reading of Richard Slotkin's Regeneration through Violence, "which talks about Puritans, Indians, captivity narratives, and the shaping of the first American hero myths," the haunting events of The Dogs of Winter take on new weight.

"There is the refrain in the book about surfers loving their heroes," says Nunn, who spent his youth in Southern California surfing and working on boats and did not go to college to study writing until he was nearly 30. "People get lionised in a way that satisfies the myth. The culture does that. I was intrigued by the character of Drew. I wanted to explore what being elevated to that stature does to someone. Drew was this handsome young guy who did something very well and people cut him a lot of slack. But in the book he's at that point in life when all of that has run out for him. He's finally done something that he can't escape the consequences of, though he's still trying to. When Fletcher goes off to photograph Drew Harmon, he believes himself to be going off to photograph this legendary surfer. What is revealed to him is the man."

So maybe there isn't a Hollywood hero in the book. Maybe this compelling, tragic, violent, and very American story will never reach the silver screen. Maybe The Dogs of Winter will remain just an amazing book. But...we'll see.