San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Home, and life, ‘built on sand’ make for solid novel
The title of Mark Ernest Pothier’s new novel — like the San Francisco neighborhood for which it’s named — brims with metaphorical potential. “Outer Sunset” is an altogether impressive debut, a wise, elegantly written book about a transformational moment for a family and their city.
Jim Finley, Pothier’s bookish narrator, is a retired teacher whose wife, Jackie, has left him and taken up with another man. His troubles don’t end there. Jim and Jackie’s 30-yearold daughter, Dorothy, an aspiring filmmaker, has recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And surging real-estate prices associated with the dot-com bubble — the story is set in the late 1990s — might eventually force him from the house he’s leased for decades.
Meanwhile, because his home is “built on sand,” Jim’s back porch “seems to tip a bit more each year.” The same could be said of his once-tranquil family life.
With Jim at a crossroads, Dorothy and her brother Gerald worry that their father will retreat further into himself, brooding over his favorite
Wallace Stevens poems and drinking too many martinis. But Jim opts for another path, one that informs the novel’s rich set pieces and reveals the complexities of his character. Pothier’s protagonist is a forthright narrator, never pandering to the reader’s expectations, never concealing his selfishness.
Jim says yes to Dorothy’s suggestion that he go on a date with Carol, a 50-something friend of hers. But it’s soon clear that his socializing muscles have atrophied. When Carol, a recovering alcoholic, talks about AA meetings, he grows annoyed. Facing so many problems of his own, listening to anecdotes about “other people’s struggles” doesn’t make for a great night.
Nonetheless, Jim and Carol give it another try, and their choppy but promising relationship, with its awkward dinners and melancholy family get-togethers, provides a nuanced look at the perils and rewards of dating in middle age.
More importantly, Jim asks Dorothy — working feverishly on what might be her first and last film, as she’s frequently exhausted from chemotherapy — to move back home. It’ll be “like an artist’s residency,” he promises, with Jim as her chef. She agrees; they drink morning tea together and attend a cancer-support group meeting. Jim’s pledge to Dorothy — that she can “belch or barf with an ‘Excuse me’ ” — is a bit of gentle humor that acknowledges the helplessness one can feel when caring for an ailing loved one.
As the book builds to its understated final act, Pothier, who lives in San Francisco and was the public information officer for the California Council for the Humanities, pens nuanced, skillful scenes that reveal shadings of Jim’s somewhat staid personality and establish a solid sense of place. Jim recalls that in 1967, while hippies “ran around naked” at Golden Gate Park, he and Jackie, then also a new teacher, stayed in their San Francisco apartment’s kitchen “drafting lesson plans.”
In the 1990s, lighting a candle for Dorothy at the Holy Virgin Cathedral in the Richmond District — Gerald’s girlfriend is a church member — Jim senses “the wonder” inherent in a building that houses the remains of an Orthodox Christian saint. Simultaneously, as a non-churchgoer, he feels like a phony: “A dread flooded my heart” — was he just trying “to make myself feel better — as if, once finished, I might feel reassured I’d covered my bases and done all I could, as a father”?
Pothier has been working on this book on and off for 30 years, and today, he writes in a note after the text, he’s older than his 58-year-old protagonist. It’s an inspiring backstory, but it would be patronizing to call this a strong effort by a not-young first-time author. Insightful and bittersweet, “Outer Sunset” is — without qualification — a terrific novel.