The Seaplane on Final Approach: A Novel

by Rebecca Rukeyser

Overview

A libidinous young woman seeks out experience on a remote Alaskan homestead in this hilarious and sensual novel "about people who belong everywhere and nowhere and the vast, unknowable wilderness of desire.... Sexy and dark and strange and absolutely perfect” (Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House)."

Tourists arrive all summer, by boat or seaplane, at Stu and Maureen Jenkins’s Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge in the Kodiak Archipelago, expecting adventure. But the spontaneity of their authentic Alaskan wilderness experience is meticulously scripted, except when real danger rears its head. Stu and Maureen’s lodge is failing, as is their marriage.

Mira has been hired for the season as the lodge’s baker and housekeeper. But she’s also busy gleefully nursing twin obsessions: building a working theory of what constitutes “sleaze” and pursuing a young fisherman she deems the embodiment of all things deliciously sleazy. Her plans become more perverse and elaborate, even as life on Lavender Island starts to unravel.

By midseason, it becomes clear that Stu, the jovial, predatory patriarch of the lodge, has turned his sexual attentions to another young employee. As the mood of the lodge spirals into chaos, the inhabitants realize just how isolated Lavender Island really is.

Hilarious, sensual, and charged with menace, The Seaplane on Final Approach brilliantly illuminates the mirage-thin line between the artificial and the feral. In this daring and psychologically razor-sharp debut, Rukeyser’s characters tear aside the facade of good manners to reveal all of our deepest needs and naked desires.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593314029
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/13/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,009,033
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

REBECCA RUKEYSER is the recipient of the inaugural Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as ZYZZYVA, The Massachusetts Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She earned her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches fiction writing at Bard College Berlin.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

 

The name Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge was honest, for the most part. The nearest neighbors were eight nautical miles away, the nearest Native village twenty nautical miles, the nearest town with a streetlight fifty. It was a lodge. It was on an island—one without roads, electricity, or any power other than that supplied by the generator. The staff wasn’t allowed to use the satellite phone, except in the case of emergencies. But there was no lavender in Alaska; what grew best on the slopes of Lavender Island was fireweed.

 

I appreciated this lie. Lavender was a cultivated flower, in the way that gloves and small spoons were cultivated. Lavender Island sounded like a place that understood, even as it hunched in the middle of nowhere, that nature was a bear at the end of the garden.

 

The owner, Maureen Jenkins, had a practiced laugh and a practiced jauntiness: she insisted on being called “Maureen.” Her hands, as she untied the mooring lines, coiled the rope, and steered the boat from the harbor, were clever. I believed that under her watchful eye I would be molded into a truly excellent baker.

 

Because that was going to be my job, Maureen explained. I was to be something of a domestic jack-­of-­all-­trades, but she’d really hired me because of my enthusiasm when it came to baking. She told me that I would have a few definite tasks: cookies were essential for packed lunches, because people crave sugar at high latitudes. Pie was essential for dessert, because people needed to taste those fresh Alaskan berries. And bread! We needed fresh bread with fresh salmon.

 

She encouraged me to do fun things in my off-­hours, like walk down the beach and hunt octopuses by luring them from their holes with syringes full of bleach. But life on a homestead was, Maureen reminded me, her eyes never leaving the flat water of the sea lane, more work than play. The guests needed continual attention.

 

•

 

It took the better part of four hours to navigate out from the town of Kodiak to Lavender Island. The journey was longer when the weather was inclement. But there was really no such thing as bad weather in Alaska, said Maureen, only bad clothing. However, it was true that days like today, with the water reflecting a high, starched sky, were the very best. Maureen turned from the wheel, pointing out a flotilla of sea otters, a whale breaching, a chartreuse green slope scattered with blooming lupine.

 

“It’s a bluebird day, Mira,” she said. “Perfect welcome weather for you.”

 

Maureen, knee steadying the wheel, filled a thermos lid with coffee and handed it to me. When the Wilderness Lodge guests came in for breakfast, she explained, my job was to keep the coffeepot full, and to serve up the platters of pancakes and the bowls of eggs. In the evening, I’d fill the wineglasses and make sure dessert was plated even before the dinner was over. I would wear black-­and-­white-­striped chef’s pants. I would be quiet and bustling.

 

When I introduced the meals, Maureen said, I should tell the guests, “Tonight Chef has prepared for you . . . ,” and then, whenever possible, throw in the word “Alaskan.” It was impossible to overuse the adjective. The fish were Alaskan. The nettles in the salad grew native on Kodiak, Alaska’s own Emerald Isle. We grew rhubarb in our Alaskan garden.

 

•

 

There were two girls jumping and waving on the beach of Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge. Maureen smiled as she anchored and tied up to a smaller aluminum skiff. The girls were the size of wedding cake toppers at this distance, with the same pleasant blurred faces.

 

“Polly and Erin,” said Maureen. “I think you’ll all hit it off—you all just graduated high school, and you all have the same sparkle.” I hadn’t graduated. I had flunked out, but I didn’t correct Maureen.

 

Polly and Erin’s voices rose up, reflecting cleanly across the water. “Welcome to Lavender Island,” they sang, to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” “Welcome to Lavender Island, welcome to Lavender Island,” and there they dissolved. They had practiced the first part of their welcome, but not the second. They couldn’t say “And so say all of us,” because there were only two of them. It was true that somewhere, in the gray clapboard buildings nestled in the alders, there were two more.

 

I helped Maureen unpack into the aluminum skiff and watched as she motored to shore. It was only a few hundred yards, but it was enough to hear the roar of the skiff recede and echo back to me from the mountain. As the motor on the skiff cut out, there was the sound of laughter. The word “Hi!” bobbled out to me.

 

In the brambles high above the Wilderness Lodge, I saw the haunches and triangular head of a bear. It was a surprisingly jolly sight: piggy snout, round ears, the movement of a seal in an aquarium. The only unsettling thing about the bear was its fur, which was the pale color of dog shit.

 

Then Polly and Maureen were back in the skiff, coming toward me. Polly smiled, with her two dimples. “Mira! You’re here!” she said, and I said, “I’m here!” When I looked back at the hillside, the bear was gone.

 

“I saw a bear,” I told Maureen.

 

“The Kodiak Archipelago is famous for its bears,” she said. “It’s the real-­deal wilderness out here, the kind of place that really molds you.”

 

On the beach, Erin took me right into a tight hug. She was covered in auburn freckles and wore an oversized Les Misérables t-shirt. Polly was terribly pretty. Her cheeks seemed to be so full of cheek that they shone. She was small, with small feet. Erin’s large feet were pointed outward, and she had a scarecrow grace.

 

I went to grab my duffel, but Erin wouldn’t hear of it. I had just arrived, she could take it. She hoisted it and placed a box on top of it. There was glee in her movements; she was happy to exert.

 

Maureen smiled, and Polly and I took up the lead.

 

“She’s like that,” said Polly. “She’s super-­strong. And you packed light!”

 

“Did you know her before?” I asked.

 

“Oh yes,” said Polly. “We’ve known each other since sixth grade.”

Editorial Reviews

A TIME Best Book of the Summer • A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2022 • A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2022 • A Goodreads Best Book of June • A Gloss Best Book of June • An Apartment Therapy Best New Book of June • Lithub 35 Novels You Need To Read This Summer • Thrillist 27 Books We Can't Wait To Read This Summer • One of The Week's Best Novels of 2022

"Rebecca Rukeyser weaves a dreamlike spell—'Twin Peaks' by way of 'Northern Exposure.' Give it to someone who wants something weird, in the best way." 
—L.A. Times

"It’s very horny and beautiful and I just ripped through it."
—Phoebe Bridgers, Vogue

"The Seaplane at Final Approach is, like all great coming-of-age stories, a perfect blend of deep, dark humor, sadness, and (of course), adolescent horniness. It’s also a love letter to the specific wildness of a place—“God’s own country,” as the proprietor of the Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge tells it. Whether the place belongs to God or something sleazier, in Rukeyser’s hands, its strange magic bewitched me."
—Literary Hub

"The Seaplane on Final Approach is a jaunty, perfectly paced and exceptionally well-written coming-of-age story. It is slyly funny, with just the right touch of darkness to take the edge off. [...] the Alaska depicted here – those edgelands where human habitation meets the beginnings of the wilderness – is a landscape of sleaze, and one in which there is only a fine line between the tame and wild."
—Times Literary Supplement

"Disreputably funny...Rebecca Rukeyser's debut is about how desire ruins everything. Mira is an imaginative voyeur: she likes dreaming up, from bed or the lodge's bakery, what people most want to do...When the end comes, it's catastrophic as well as lengthy, gruesome fun."
—The Telegraph (UK)

"[A] quirky, wry debut...[A] deftly juggled mix of mercilessly sharp character judgment and gentle compassion for each person’s failings...One for readers who enjoy the current crop of distinctly twisted coming of age tales from female Gen Zers and the sort of dive into dysfunction championed by Ottessa Moshfegh."
—The Times (UK)

"An illuminating and magical coming-of-age story."
—The Daily Mail (UK) 

"An impressive debut."
—The Gloss

“If you never quite thought of Alaska as the center of all things lust-worthy and sexy, Rebecca Rukeyser’s debut will have you thinking otherwise.”
—Thrillist

“Quite funny...As a coming-of-age novel, The Seaplane on Final Approach stars a complicated and engaging narrator against a well-wrought Alaska background. As it entertains, it also explores human nature and something about what draws people to Alaska.”
—Anchorage Daily News

"Fans of the sensuous, droll obscenity of Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, exhilarating transgressiveness of Alissa Nutting’s Tampa, uncanny sense of unease in Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, and claustrophobic domesticity of Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women will find a lot to love in Rebecca Rukeyser’s debut novel. Inspired by the author’s own experiences working in the Alaskan tourism industry, The Seaplane on Final Approach is a bristling, lusty coming-of-age tale about a sex-obsessed young woman seeking out experience on a remote Alaskan homestead."
—Apartment Therapy

“I didn’t realize how much I needed this lusty, funny, heartbreaking book until I devoured it in a single sitting. The Seaplane on Final Approach is a novel set at the edge of the world, about people who belong everywhere and nowhere and the vast, unknowable wilderness of desire. A sharp, flawless debut. Sexy and dark and strange and absolutely perfect.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body & Other Parties

"An age-old story—puppy love meets jaded lust to dance their death spiral inside a young woman's head—told with the shameless authenticity of 2022. I ate it up."  
—Nell Zink, author of Doxology

"Brilliant and possibly the horniest thing I've ever read. But this is Advanced Horniness, the kind that can see the sex in phone book listings, vicarious jealousy, five thousand dollars, and the cold devouring ocean. It's as if Muriel Spark got seasick and dropped molly instead of dramamine."
—Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

“The Seaplane on Final Approach is an adventure story about the peculiar fantasies that make up our ideas about adventure in the first place. It is a tender trickster of a novel, told with humor, insight and just the right amount of raunch, and readers will delight in Rukeyser’s singular storytelling prowess. Read it now."
—Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House

"Erotic possibility and inevitable ruin animate the Alaskan wilderness in this astounding debut about the first summer of the rest of your life. The Seaplane on Final Approach perfectly telegraphs the suspended animation of tourist-trap life within an eerie life-changing season, the gravity of which will only be felt decades later. Original and adventurous, horny and hilarious—it's everything I want from a book."
—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

"Rebecca Rukeyser has crafted a novel that is a kind of anti-coming of age ballad, a celebration of taking the wrong paths in life, the beauty of what mistakes can teach us about ourselves. The Seaplane On Final Approach will bring you to a remote Alaskan island and leave you unsettled, unsure of how to return to the mainland. A debut that will be praised for its darkness and humor, but should be read for its deep sensitivity."
—Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl

"Every unhappy Alaskan nature resort is unhappy in its own way, as Rebecca Rukeyser demonstrates with irresistible elan in this stunning debut novel. The Seaplane on Final Approach is funny, sensual, elegiac, and phenomenally perceptive. It had me turning pages as I would follow a beautiful forest path frequented by grizzly bears: alert, enthralled, both avid and apprehensive to find what lies beyond the bend. Rukeyser is a wonderfully compassionate and original writer, and this novel is not to be missed."
—Tom Drury, author of Pacific

“A strange, dreamlike coming-of-age story. . . With a delicate touch, the story invites rumination on themes of obsession and fixation, the dichotomous beauty and eeriness of an isolated landscape, and the struggle of locating oneself within a new environment. [With] power and subtlety […] the obviously talented Rukeyser has crafted a vividly beautiful and odd world; the specificity of Lavender Island propels the story here as much as the characters and the plot, and that is thanks to her descriptive and imagistic prose. This darkly compelling novel promises more interesting writing to come from Rukeyser.”
—Kirkus

"In her debut novel, Rukeyser invents Lavender Island, a place off the coast of Kodiak Island, Alaska, that can only be reached by boat or seaplane, and where cars don't exist. Into this pristinely rugged, claustrophobic setting she drops Mira, a teenager exiled for the summer to work as a baker at the island's Wilderness Lodge. But what Mira's parents consider a sort of punishment for her own wildness she sees as freedom, a catalyst for even greater escape, preferably with the sleazy-sexy fisherman step-cousin she met a year ago and can't stop thinking about. Through the scrim of Mira's detachment, readers meet lodge owners Stu and Maureen, whose facade as long-married, happy homesteaders crumbles as the novel progresses and Stu's playful affection for Mira's coworker, a teenager herself, reveals itself as something else. Rukeyser's writing is spare and deliberate as, from a murky present, adult Mira looks back on this now-crystallized teenage summer with a kind of awe."
—Booklist

“Rukeyser’s assured, elegant prose brings colour and outline to the great outdoors…Her debut novel is part adventure story, party coming of age tale, about a woman on the cusp of adulthood, fully of inchoate longing. If moving a character to a foreign world in order to bring about a transformation is a time-word staple of fiction writers, Rukeyser takes that old trick and flies her reader off to a brave new world.” 
—Irish Times

"[A] chimerical yet solemn debut...This novels beautifully written and there is a strange authenticity to Mira's dilemma: a young woman clinging to the lustful fantasies of youth, still searching for the true meaning of sleaze."
—New Zealand Listener

From the Publisher

04/18/2022

In Rukeyser’s intoxicating debut, high school dropout Mira, 18, finds herself witness to a whirlwind of drama on a remote Alaskan island. Mira, obsessed with the concept of sleaziness, appreciates Alaska for “contain more sleaze than the entire lower forty-eight” after a trip the previous summer, during which she fell into unrequited lust over her aunt’s seedy stepson, 24-year-old Ed. She returns and takes a job as a housekeeper and baker at Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge, with the goal of finding Ed and building a life with him. She’s one of six employees on the island, including Maureen and Stu, the middle-aged married couple who own the business; 18-year-olds Polly and Erin; and a recovering alcoholic chef. When not masturbating to the fantasy of phoning Ed, she notices Stu taking an interest in Erin. Tensions in the group escalate, creating a sense of desperation that’s heightened by the “deep, solemn fear” cast by the landscape. Mira, with her propensity for daydreaming and detachment, imagines intricate inner lives for her colleagues, a charming and fascinating element that takes this beyond the standard workplace drama. Rukeyser’s signature bleak humor will leave readers excited to see what comes next. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

Publishers Weekly

01/01/2022

In the Kodiak Archipelago, Stu and Maureen Jenkins's Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge promises adventure, but in the current summer season is delivering nothing but trouble. The lodge is failing, Stu is pursuing a young employee, baker/housekeeper Mira is pursuing a bad-news fisherman, and the guests are getting anxious. With praise from the likes of Carmen Maria Machado and Nell Zink.

Library Journal

2022-04-13
Rukeyser’s debut is a strange, dreamlike coming-of-age story set in coastal Alaska.

Mira, the 18-year-old narrator, is, oddly, obsessed with the concept of “sleaze”: defining it and identifying it. She spends a summer working as a baker at Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge, a homestead that functions as a sort of bed-and-breakfast for international tourists. She passes time fantasizing about her aunt’s stepson, Ed, and observing the strange social dynamics that result from the eclectic coterie of personalities working at the homestead, which include a middle-aged married couple, two other teen girls, and a brooding addict. While she is obsessed with sleaze and with her imagined future with Ed, Mira is largely detached from her actual surroundings, participating mostly as an observer—until the drama among her colleagues becomes impossible to ignore. The detached perspective through which we experience this unfolding narrative adds to its rarified, dreamy quality. With a delicate touch, the story invites rumination on themes of obsession and fixation, the dichotomous beauty and eeriness of an isolated landscape, and the struggle of locating oneself within a new environment. It is a testament to the power and subtlety of Rukeyser’s writing that the novel’s violent climax, though preceded largely by a sense of quietude throughout, does not feel surprising or out of place; it is simply the result of the building social tensions and sense of desperation among the group and of a particular landscape whose compelling beauty—the author shows us—conceals dangerous potential. The obviously talented Rukeyser has crafted a vividly beautiful and odd world; the specificity of Lavender Island propels the story here as much as the characters and the plot, and that is thanks to her descriptive and imagistic prose.

This darkly compelling novel promises more interesting writing to come from Rukeyser.

Kirkus Reviews