SURF NOIR: TAPPING THE SOURCE

TAPPING THE SOURCE
By Kem Nunn

It occasionally happens that a book is so good I am speechless, and Kem Nunn’s surf noir, Tapping the Source, is such a book. I don’t want to spoil the mood with words. Suffice it to say that ‘surf noir’ can hardly begin to describe this book. Yes it is about surfers, and crime. And yes it takes place on the edge of a benighted continent, in that pastel hot house of nihilism, southern California. Ike Tucker is a young man living at his Uncle Gordon’s store in San Arco, a desert town with broken screens and grease stains on the ground. He works on motorcycles. A man arrives in a car and hands him a piece of paper with 3 names. He tells him if he wants to know what happened to his sister he will find those men, in Huntington Beach. So he sets off in search of his missing sister. What he finds I will leave up to you to discover. What you will find in this book is a prose style so perfect each sentence, each word, each syllable shimmers. And he can write a story. Nothing is wasted.  The story moves with the momentum of a thriller but never shows the machinery or neglects character for plot. Somehow Nunn manages to convey depths of emotion, barely articulated feelings and impressions, through vivid visual descriptions of place. The peeling paint, the rust, the transcendent joy of riding waves, every ounce of description is threaded with Ike’s feelings, his apprehensions, his growing awareness of the world around him. And that is a brutal world of vagrant youth, preying on itself, and attenuated, decadent men. As you would expect there is sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. There is pornography. It is a tale of bikers and surfers and runaways.  But it is also a tale of friendship and love, where discarded, uneducated kids have insight into life and each other. Loyalty, misplaced and noble and the hazards of honor lurk within the narrative, give it its heart. For all of its momentum and suspense, Nunn never rushes. Nunn is often compared to Raymond Chandler, as well as other California writers (never Didion though, and I don’t know why, maybe I should!) but I think he is a much better writer. There, I’ve said it. Now please, find this book and READ IT.

Kem Nunn has written other books, and I look forward to reading them all one day. He was also involved in a project for HBO, John from Cincinnati. Now, I want to emphasize that this was a disaster. But it is one of those glorious failures that light up the heavens, glistering Phaeton! A guy comes to town…(in this case, a seedy collection of shacks inhabited by aging surfers)…and he might be the Messiah. What can I say? The promise of television is that a hundred shows like this will air and out of that hundred a dozen will be good and one brilliant. Kem Nunn went where only Dennis Potter dared to go, and HBO had the good sense to allow him and the producer he worked with to do it. The show makes no sense, it’s wackily, portentously bad, with Luke Perry leading the charge. Bravo Kem Nunn!