Stern Men

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Elizabeth Gilbert's first novel is the funny, warmhearted story of Fort Niles and Courne Haven, two fictional islands off the coast of Maine where "lobstermen are constantly competing with one another for good fishing territory. They get in each other's way, tangle each other's trap lines, spy on each other's boats, and steal each other's information." The lobster wars between the islands have shaped the life and times of their quirky, stubborn inhabitants for generations.

In 1967, Ruth Thomas is just nine years old: a plucky, sarcastic girl whose mother leaves the island under a mysterious shroud involving the wealthy Ellis family of Fort Niles. Raised by her lobsterman father, Ruth spends most of her time with her offbeat neighbors: Senator Simon, an eccentric septuagenarian and aquaphobe, and the loving Mrs. Pommeroy and her seven dim-witted sons.

In Stern Men, Ruth blossoms, comes of age, and falls in love with the shy handsome Owney Wishnell, a born lobsterman from rival Courne Haven; and becomes a shrewd businesswoman who stands up to the Ellis family to claim her rightful legacy. This loveable heroine single-handedly rallies the ragtag group of lobstermen, definitively puts an end to the centuries-old lobster wars, and prepares to embrace a glistening future full of new possibilities. The talented Elizabeth Gilbert has created a community of immensely satisfying and very real characters, and delivers a rich story full of good humor and a solid dose of important life lessons.

Surf and Turf

Elizabeth Gilbert follows her remarkable story collection, Pilgrims, with Stern Men, a richly imagined first novel set on two fictional islands. Courne Haven and Fort Niles are 20 miles off the coast of northern Maine, yet only a mile from each other; this proximity has bred both similarity and rivalry. Their gene pools are limited, and lobster fishing is their sole means of making a living. "Lobsters do not recognize boundaries and neither, therefore, can lobstermen.... It is a mean business, and it makes for mean men." The history of the two islands is a series of "lobster wars," and their inhabitants eye each other across Worthy Channel, constantly anticipating a new outbreak of hostility.

The novel's heroine, Ruth Thomas, was born on Fort Niles, and her parents—a local lobsterman and a woman with a mysterious, aristocratic background—separated while she is still young. Ruth is reared by her widowed neighbor, Mrs. Pommeroy, while remaining close to her father (who "wasn't against mending Ruth's skirt hems with a staple gun") and the island's other rough types. Eventually, following the wishes of her mother's family, she is sent to boarding school on the mainland, so that she might be exposed "to something other than lobster fishermen, alcoholism, ignorance, and cold weather."

When Ruth returns, she is 18 and no longer a girl. "Her hair was so thick, she could sew a button on a coat with it. Her skin was darker than anyone else's on Fort Niles, and she tanned to a smooth, even brown.... She had a bigger rear end than she wanted, but she didn't fuss about it too much.... She was a heavy sleeper. She was independent. She was sarcastic." Accused of thinking she's smarter than everyone else, she can't deny it with much conviction because "she did, in fact, think she was considerably smarter.... She felt it in her very lungs." Ruth argues with her father and—kicking against the control of her rich, distant grandfather—resists the notion that she should attend college. "The rest of her life," she admits, has "absolutely no shape to it"; what she needs is a future that will engage her spirited intelligence.

The wild, salty milieu of Stern Men is reminiscent of Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. Tragedy and comedy are often indistinguishable, and surprises come one after the other. The wry narrator operates from a slight distance, commenting on the action in parenthetical asides and whirling digressions; the result is a world steeped in fascination, a novel that requires the reader to slow and become immersed in its off-kilter atmosphere. Here, one child's inability to pronounce the letter "r" spreads across the island, until "you could hear the great strong fishermen complaining that they had to mend their wopes or fix their wigging or buy a new short-wave wadio;" brawls erupt over whether a man could "beat up a five-foot monkey in a fight."

Most convincing and resonant are the novel's portrayals of the characters on Fort Niles: Ruth's best friend, Mrs. Pommeroy, mother to five inbred sons; Cal Cooley, her grandfather's unctuous toady, as unavoidable as he is full of indecent proposals; and Senator Simon, an aged and eccentric bachelor who loves learning but fears the sea. Yet when Ruth leaves the island to visit her mother, she passes her reluctance along to the reader; the characters around her pale as her interest slips. And at times, even on Fort Niles, the narrative seems more concerned with (or mesmerized by) its digressive creativity than it is with moving the plot. Still, digressions often seem to be the point—the details and background history are so convincing, the connections between them so tight and compelling, that they make the most far-fetched people and events ring undeniably true.

Gilbert's descriptive prose is the driving force behind this alchemy. Irresistible and irrepressible, it provides both enthusiasm and authority. A fat baby is treated with the same wonder ("His belly stuck out comically over his diaper, and his thighs were taut and plump. His arms seemed to be assembled in segments, and he had several chins. His chest was slick with drool.") as is Ruth's first sexual experience: "Ruth and Owney went at it like pros, right from the start. There, in that shack on the filthy woolen blanket, they were doing raunchy, completely satisfying things to each other. They were doing things it might take other partners months to figure out. She was on top of him; he was on top of her. There seemed to be no part of each other that they were not willing to put into the other's mouth...." The language is seamless, unflagging, and provocative, urging itself on.

Ruth's encounter with Owney, of Courne Haven's famous Wishnell family, sets the novel's final act in motion. The inhabitants of both islands are scandalized, and the lovers kept apart, but Ruth stubbornly holds out for what she needs. In several bold moves, she manages to balance the injustices of her family's past while providing a future that unites Fort Niles and Courne Haven. The ingenious way details accrete and the care with which the story is told are what make this stunning, satisfying conclusion believable. Stern Men seduces the reader, arousing amazement and sympathy; like Ruth Thomas, it's big-hearted and full of bluster.

About the Author

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the story collection Pilgrims, a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Hemingway Award. It was a New York Times Notable Book and was listed as one of the Most Intriguing Books of 1997 by Glamour magazine. Pilgrims also won best first fiction awards from the Paris Review, the Southern Review, and Ploughshares. Gilbert's fiction has been published in Esquire, STORY, GQ, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and the Mississippi Review. She is also a Pushcart Prize winner, and her nonfiction writing has earned her a 1999 National Magazine Award nomination. Annie Proulx called Gilbert a "young writer of incandescent talent." Currently a writer-at-large for GQ, Gilbert lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

USA Today

A wonderful first novel about life, love and lobster fishing...Stern Men is high entertainment.

San Francisco Chronicle

Howlingly funny.

New York Times

Her metaphoric writing flashes with welcome brillance...[Stern Men] makes its mark through vividness and toughness.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

Gilbert's "beautifully written" and "wonderfully engaging" first novel is set on two remote islands off the coast of Maine. The "sly, sardonic" story of Ruth Thomas, who returns to her hometown in Maine from boarding school determined to throw her education overboard and join the "stern men" who work the lobster boats, was described as "completely transporting," with "fascinating" characters full of "depth and complexity."

Publishers Weekly

Set on two fictitious islands in northern Maine during the 1970s, this first novel by the author of a sparkling story collection, Pilgrims, begins slowly but warms up with smart, sassy humor. Isolated from the mainland by 20 miles of sea, but separated from each other only by a small channel, the islands of Fort Niles and Courne Haven should be natural allies, sharing the local lobster industry. Instead, the two communities are old enemies, torn apart by centuries of hostile, occasionally violent competition among their territorial lobstermen. Ruth Thomas, daughter of one of Fort Niles's most cutthroat lobstermen, has returned home after four years at a private girls' school, determined both to resist her rich grandfather's plans to send her to college and to find her place among the island's rough-spoken personalities. Both propositions prove more difficult than the headstrong romantic expects. As Gilbert charts Ruth's attempts to decide her future, she introduces a strong dose of lobster lore and a large cast of sly villains and oddball characters. Her prose is as light-hearted and amusing as ever, though some narrative twists lack the emotional resonance of her previous work and several characters seem hemmed in as caricatures. Ruth's meeting with her estranged mother is smoothed over in an anticlimactic fashion, blunting the power of the scene, and her offbeat coming-of-age story gets going only a third of the way through the book. Nonetheless, Gilbert's comic timing grows sharper in the second half, and her gift for lively, authentic dialogue and atmospheric settings continually lights up this entertaining, and surprisingly thought-provoking, romp. 5-city author tour. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

KLIATT

Not about severe, uncompromising men, the "stern" men of the title are men who work in the stern, or back, of a fishing boat. On Fort Niles and Court Haven, Gilbert's fictional islands off the coast of Maine, lobster fishing accounts for most of the industry and virtually all of the social life. Years before the story begins, a feud—a "lobster war"—that could only have begun in such an isolated spot started here. The result is that the populations of the two islands barely speak to each other. Ruth Thomas, born on Fort Niles in 1958, is the central character in this story of relationships that never quite happen, that should never have happened, or that could have been. No one seems really happy, although some good things do happen. No one has any money to speak of, except the Ellis family. Ruth's connection with this family is twisted. Her grandmother was "adopted" by the Ellis family as a companion to Miss Vera Ellis, but she ended up an unpaid slave. When Ruth's mother, Mary, was born, and Miss Vera took over the baby's care, the grandmother drowned herself. Mary was "allowed" to marry Stan Thomas, and eventually gave birth to Ruth. The Ellis family, especially brother Ralph, continue to manipulate lives, and eventually everything is explained. But the twists involved in the explanation make the story very unpleasant. Ruth's character is complex and fairly real, but the others seem flat, with character traits that are constructed just for the story. Reasonable vacation reading, but not great literature. KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students, and adults. 2000, Houghton Mifflin, Mariner, 289p., $13.00. Ages 17 to adult. Reviewer: Judith H. Silverman;Chevy Chase, MD , November 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 6)

Library Journal

This is the first novel by Gilbert, whose collection of short stories, Pilgrims (LJ 8/97), was published to critical acclaim. The novel takes place on the remote Maine island of Fort Niles and its neighboring twin, Courne Haven. For years, the residents of these islands have been lobster fishermen constantly at war with one another for control of the waters. Ruth Thomas is born into this community, but she is not quite of it. Her father's family has fished here for generations. Her mother was raised as a servant, the illegitimate child of an adopted daughter of the influential Ellis family, who summer on the island where they once ran a quarry. Ruth's task is to find her own way in the world, despite the Ellis family's attempts to control her and the opinion of many that a smart girl like her would be better off moving to the mainland. This is a beautiful novel, funny and moving at the same time and populated by some quite memorable characters. Highly recommended for public and academic fiction collections.--Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Melinda Lewis-Matravers

Gilbert's novel, which takes on stereotypical Mainers and their isolated islands, is wonderful fun.
— Islands

Ron Charles

…perfect for summer reading and deep enough to crack the prevailing wisdom that competition is the highest state of being.
—The Christian Science Monitor

From the Publisher

[Gilbert's] gift for lively, authentic dialogue and atmospheric setting lights up this entertaining, and surprisingly thought-provoking romp.
Publishers Weekly, Starred

"Gilbert's tangy language has as much music as muscle; the novel is Emersonian in its clarity and Austenian in its sly social observation." Mirabella