April 1, 2001
Like the Y2K apocalypse that never happened, this doomsday thriller goes bust. Hockenberry, Dateline NBC correspondent and author of Moving Violations (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award), tries to cram too many reportorial themes into his bulging narrative: the displacement of Pacific Northwest Chinook tribes, the questionable merits of salmon hatcheries and federal dams, the dangers of nuclear power and the threat posed by white supremacist fringe groups. There's a plot buried under the mountain of issues, but it's actually more of a highly convoluted premise. A Chinook warrior named Charley Shen-oh-way, long assumed dead, has begun slaughtering employees of a federal salmon hatchery to avenge the government's appropriation of sacred Indian ground. His half-Chinook daughter Francine, director of the hatchery, intuits Charley's involvement in the savage murders and withholds incriminating evidence, aided by her wildly improbable love interest, Duke McCurdy, a white supremacist radio provocateur with a secret heart of gold. Meanwhile, Jack Charnock, an unstable weapons researcher who's at last perfected a portable implosion device, has just been terminated from nearby Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and isn't happy. These and other unsympathetic, one-dimensional characters link up implausibly to announce the novel's themes, even at the most intimate moments ("They have always betrayed me, my mother's eyes," she whispered. "Hate betrays me," Duke whispered back. "Who can escape his tribe?") Even Francine's semicomatose white mother stays on point, robotically intoning the Icelandic word for "big flood." Hockenberry, a one-time radio reporter in the Pacific Northwest, has enthusiastically researched the region, but this silly, pretentious novel doesn't show off either writer or culture to best advantage. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (May 17) Forecast: Hockenberry's first book, Moving Violations, was a national bestseller, but as a memoir, its sales bounced high off his fame as an NPR commentator and TV reporter who's also a paraplegic. Some attention will accrue to his first novel because of his continued media presence, and blurbs from Bill McKibben and William Dietrich will draw in browsers, but when all is said and done, he's not much of a thriller writer and, ultimately, sales will reflect this.