After Surfing Ocean Beach

Joseph Jones is librarian emeritus at the University of British Columbia
Library and the author of Reference Sources for Canadian Literary
Studies.

Loss pervades this novel, starting from an adolescent love warped and
wrecked by circumstances. With his mother dying of cancer, Rick turns to
Annie in their last year of high school. Insistence on Rick’s career
preparation leads to their inevitable separation. The course of
Annie’s life is constrained in a different way by the expectations of
family and society. In first person, Rick and Annie alternate for 13
chapters, adding detail to a portrait of the three generations that
envelop their own histories.

Second marriages abound in all three generations. Children disappoint
their parents as they take their own ways in conduct and direction. A
stepmother’s decline into her final few years precipitates the action.
Finding his expertise in computer technology some substitute for ocean
surfing, a paraplegic acts as essential narrative go-between. A Vietnam
veteran still copes with nightmares as he runs a gardening business and
offers the support of a “straight-arrow” husband. At beginning and
end, deaths disrupt lives and change things forever. Through stubborn
endurance and moments of compassion, the inhabitants of this world
continue in lives that see no easy resolutions.

The two narrating characters carry the story. Working-class Annie stays
close to home and deals with motherhood, an unfortunate marriage, and
employment as a nurse. Upper-middle-class Rick proceeds through large
changes in education, geographic location, family, and career. After 30
years, the lives of Annie and Rick intersect in a single ambiguous
event. In the aftermath, Rick comes to recognize areas of blindness in
his life, becoming an Oedipus that is more father than son.

The quality of the writing mostly overcomes the unavoidable contrivance
of the plot. Subtle touches (e.g., “the blade kept its edge like the
best surgical tool”) link description and theme with narrative. Tempo,
structure, selection, and proportion combine to engage the reader. A
predominant tone of elegy finds echo in a dedication to the author’s
deceased sister, “who never told our mother she surfed.” Particulars
of the San Diego setting create a strong sense of place and time.
Supplementing psychological realism is a perceptive sociology that
amounts to a microcosm of late 20th-century America.