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New West Book Review

Boy in the Wilderness: Summer Wood’s “Wrecker”

By Jenny Shank, 3-14-11

Wrecker
by Summer Wood
Bloomsbury, 290 pages, $20

Taos-based writer Summer Wood‘s heartfelt new novel is about the unconventional upbringing of a boy named Wrecker, who is raised by a collection of well-intentioned semi-parents while he roams the redwood forests in the remote Lost Coast area of Northern California. Wrecker examines what happens when a task as complicated as raising a child is shared collectively, and delves into the doubts, frustrations, guilt, and joy that parents feel when they are confronted by the endless needs, misbehavior, and love that a child provides.

The book begins in San Francisco in 1965, when that city was “home to saints and sinners and seekers of every stripe.” One such seeker, Lisa Fay, leaves the strictures of her parents’ house to join the counterculture in San Francisco, has a fling with a sailor and is left with a son unknown by his father. She doesn’t name her son at first, “She called him HeyBoy or BigBoy or Beauty; she called him Honey and Sweetie and Champ.” When he’s a toddler she asks if he can “leave off wrecking things, for once,” and he replies, “I a wrecker,” so that’s what she names him finally—Wrecker.

Lisa falls in with a drug dealer, is involved in a shooting that injures a policeman, and is sentenced to thirty years in prison, eligible for parole in fifteen. Wrecker stays in foster care until his uncle Len, married to Lisa’s older sister Meg, agrees to take him home.

Home for Len is an unusual arrangement deep in the Lost Coast woods on a plot of land called Bow Farm. Len lives on one part of it with his wife Meg, who recently suffered brain damage from a freak dental surgery accident, and needs constant supervision. On the other part of Bow Farm, four adults live in a sort of commune arrangement, none of them related to the others, each of them fleeing a past that’s left them emotionally wounded. There’s beautiful, capable Willow, who restores “precious carpets” and turns “spun wool into weavings that dazzled the eye and caught the heart.” There’s Melody, a one-time hellion raised by a wealthy family who told her father, “give me twenty thousand dollars and you may omit me from your will without incurring any bitterness on my part.” She uses the money to purchase the land for Bow Farm with Willow.

They take in Ruth, a full-bodied, good-humored middle-aged woman who turns up on the beach half drowned, and Johnny Appleseed, a back-to-the-lander who plants trees in deforested areas and becomes an early eco-activist. Wood skillfully teases out the mysteries behind each of these characters, gradually revealing what caused them to retreat from the world and head into the woods.

Into this milieu comes Wrecker, a rough-and-tumble three-year-old, somewhat savage from his foster care experience. Len quickly realizes he can’t care for his nephew, and turns to the residents of Bow Farm for help. None of them can take care of Wrecker completely, but after one false start, they agree on an arrangement with Melody assuming the lead role as Wrecker’s mother—that is, the one who has to worry about him, sacrifice for him, and discipline him, while the others enjoy his company and offer what they can of their love and experience.

The book follows Wrecker’s growth into a young man, with tension provided by the fact that Lisa Fay, the birth mother he can’t remember who Melody hasn’t told him about, will be up for parole when he’s eighteen. Willow reflects on Wrecker’s upbringing at one point, “It was odd, but odd was no crime. He was safe, he was loved, he was well cared for. Melody saw to it that he had everything a kid could need and a hefty portion of the things he simply wanted. There was even a way that you could look at his life and think: the perfect childhood. Rousseauian—if Rousseau’s noble savage had a pirate manqué for an aunt, an abandoned Willys Jeep for a rocket ship, and the run of the forest.”

In Wrecker, Wood vividly captures the atmosphere of summer-of-love-era San Francisco, life in the remote redwood forests, and the experimental communal living arrangements that were springing up at the time. Wood’s insights into raising kids are accurate, such as Willow’s reflection on teenage boys: “When hunger struck she’d had a small window to satisfy it, and if she failed that they fell apart, turned from fairly reasonable human beings to beasts out of control, raging, accusing, carrying on until a critical mass of calories had been processed.” Wrecker turns the natural human impulse to place hope for the future in a child into a moving and involving story.

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