Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn (1989) by Paul Watkins

1001 Novels: A Library of America

Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn (1989) 

by Paul Watkins 

Newport, Rhode Island

Rhode Island: 2/9

     One of the interesting aspects of the 1001 Novels: A Library of America is looking at the careers of the authors on the list.  A major difference between 1001 Novels vs. 1001 Books is the depth and scope of both projects.  1001 Books is world wide from the beginning of literature to the end, 1001 Novels is the United States and almost entirely 21st/20th century.    All the authors on the 1001 Books list are canon somewhere, even if that somewhere isn't the 21st century United States.  On the other hand, many of the authors on the 1001 Novels list are barely even read.  Looking at each new author and their career trajectory has proved almost as interesting as the books themselves.

   Paul Watkins in particular is interesting.  He is from the United States but was educated in the UK (at Eton, the fanciest of the "public schools").  His debut novel Night Over Day Over Night (1988) was nominated for the Booker Prize, longlist presumably- or maybe they didn't have the longlist back in 1988.   he published nine novels between 1988 and 2005, all of them with respectable publishers.  None of them were a hit, and several didn't even merit a review from the New York Times Book Review.  

  In 2005 he gave up on literary fiction and started publishing historical detective fiction under a pseudonym, Sam Eastland.   Which is all to say that it looks like Watkins gave it a good try- didn't make it as a writer of literary fiction and then moved one to genre work, which appears to have been marginally succesful (over a thousand Amazon reviews for his biggest books of detective fiction, no more than a hundred or so reviews for this biggest work of literary fiction).

   Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn is a relatively straight forward coming-of-age novel about James Pfeiffer, the younger son of a owner-operator of a fishing trawler in Newport, Rhode Island.  James' dad and mom are obsessed with providing a non-fishing life for their boys.  The reason given is a traumatizing experience for the family when the father was left adrift in the Atlantic Ocean for several days as a younger fisherman.   Dad still wakes up screaming at night, years later.

      None the less, James blows his chance at college when he accuses a classmate of stealing his camera, and is sent back home for the rest of the semester.  There, against his parents wishes, he finds himself beginning his career as a fisherman.   The story of an over-educated scion taking to the sea against his families wishes is at least as old as Two Years Before the Mast (1840), by Richard Henry Dana.   Watkins depiction of life among the fishing reprobates of Newport Rhode Island is interesting, but protagonist James Pfeiffer is less so.  Why would anyone chose the life of a deep sea fisherman? Pfeiffer is clearly motivated by the desire to "own his own boat," but otherwise he just seems like an immature adolescent who doesn't know what he wants.