The Boatbuilder

by Daniel Gumbiner

Overview

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Long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award in Fiction.

At 28 years old, Eli "Berg" Koenigsberg has never encountered a challenge he couldn't push through, until a head injury leaves him with lingering headaches and a weakness for opiates. Berg moves to a remote Northern California town, seeking space and time to recover, but soon finds himself breaking into homes in search of pills. Addled by addiction and chronic pain, Berg meets Alejandro, a reclusive, master boatbuilder, and begins to see a path forward. Alejandro offers Berg honest labor, but more than this, he offers him a new approach to his suffering, a template for survival amid intense pain. Nurtured by his friendship with Alejandro and aided, too, by the comradeship of many in Talinas, Berg begins to return to himself. Written in gleaming prose, this is a story about resilience, community, and what it takes to win back your soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944211554
Publisher:	McSweeney's Publishing
Publication date:	07/10/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	542,228
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Daniel Gumbiner was born and raised in Northern California. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011 and now lives in Southern Nevada. The Boatbuilder is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

The Boatbuilder offers a decidedly gentle, sometimes quietly rewarding window onto the attempted recovery of an American opioid addict. It's a fictional companion piece of sorts to nonfiction books about self-reliance like Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft or Alexander Langlands's Craeft, which argue for the emotional benefits of unplugging and working with your hands…The cast of small-town characters [Gumbiner] imagines is like that of a 1990s indie movie; a compliment, in this case. The place and its people are convincingly alive.

The New York Times - John Williams

[Gumbiner] allows his characters and small-town setting to shine in this beautiful novel about finding one’s place, no matter how small, in the world."

—Booklist

"This is an utterly beautiful book. To read it is to understand that you have been waiting for it." —Alejandro Zambra

“Daniel Gumbiner brings coastal California into sparkling focus in this moving story of a young man’s transition into adulthood. Told with wit and heart, The Boatbuilder is a meditation on love, loyalty, and the shared experiences that turn strangers into family.” —Tayari Jones

From the Publisher

2018-08-21

An opioid addict-turned-apprentice boat builder tries to find himself on the Northern California coast.

We meet 27-year-old "digital refugee" Eli "Berg" Koenigsberg at a low point in his life: After a concussion led to an opioid addiction, then rehab, he has moved to Talinas, a town on the Northern California coast, where he hopes to establish "a sober life"—instead he's breaking into houses for drugs. But within pages, Berg cleans himself up—at least a little. He gets a job, manages to wean himself temporarily off pills, and then apprentices himself to Alejandro Vega, a boat builder who tells him things like "stop thinking about the result. Stop wanting [the work] to be over right away and I promise everything will go better." Alejandro is "a genius," his mind "borderless and kinetic," and under his influence Berg learns not just to work with wood, but to "get outside of himself." But will Alejandro's healing influence be enough to combat the lurking urges of addiction? Gumbiner's debut is an underachieving redemption tale, and its failures are familiar to that particular genus of didactic literature—namely: The difficulties from which the characters need redeeming feel like excuses for the author to show us how exactly redemption can be had. Gumbiner could have sidestepped this with detail, by diving deeply into his human subjects—but his novel, like its characters, aspires toward simplicity rather than complexity. The result is that everything—the problem, the solutions, the quirky Northern California vibe, even the potentially fascinating fact that Berg robbed Alejandro's house before later becoming his apprentice—feels like a plot device, and thus unconvincing, one-dimensional, bland. There is the occasional arresting line; for example, the skin on an addict's face looks like it has been "stretched tight and then stapled across his jawline." But the book is mostly composed of apathetic sentences (a supporting character's storytelling is "disjointed and difficult to follow, like an avant-garde novel"), vapid dialogue (" ‘What's up, Berg?…' ‘Hi Kenneth…do you remember my girlfriend, Nell?' ‘Hi,' Nell said. ‘Oh hi," Kenneth said"), and clichéd profundity ("the problem was he didn't know what he wanted").

An unfortunately bland sketch of addiction, millennial listlessness, and the redemptive quality of craftsmanship with some Northern California flare.

Kirkus Reviews