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Tapping the Source
Novel by Kem Nunn
Reviewed by Scott H. Urban

Tapping the Source Kem Nunn Paperback - $10.36 Published May 2000 Four Walls Eight Windows

Waves and mystery, guns and grit: Kem Nunn mixes them together and comes up with "surf noir" in Tapping the Source. I’m not on the west coast, and I’m not a surfer, but I loved every minute in the author’s slightly surreal California – a theme park expanded to the borders of the state without the knowledge of its inhabitants.

Only eighteen, slightly naive, physically scrawny, emotionally undeveloped, Ike Turner is an unlikely hero. He’s never known anything other than his desert home, San Arco. In one of the book’s best passages, he reflects on the infinite and intimidating vastness of his environment:

[H]e knew that if he waited there would come a time, stars fading, slim band of light creeping on the horizon, when the silence would grow until it was unbearable, until it was as if the land itself were about to break it, to give up some secret of its own.

Out of the blue, he receives word that his runaway sister Ellen might have gotten into more trouble than she could handle, in Huntington Beach. With a couple hundred dollars and three names to track down, Ike leaves home to trace his sister’s whereabouts.

Thrust into a truly strange land, Ike tries to find his bearings among the bikers and surfers, the punks and the tourists. At first he can only get one person to talk to him: Preston, a barrel-chested biker who will only tell Ike he’s better off running back home. When Ike discovers the names on his list belong to local surfers, he decides to get a board and learn to surf, hoping he’ll eventually work his way into the local scene. But his first attempt is literally a wash-out, and he’s even beaten by one of the locals for his intrusion.

Ike finally insinuates himself in Hound Adams’ circle. Hound, one of the names on Ike’s list, is a flashy surfer whose home is the scene of continual parties. As time goes on, Ike discovers Hound is also dealing drugs, snorting coke, and filming soft porn. Against his better judgment, Ike begins working for Hound, losing sight of his goal and the affection of his new girlfriend, Michelle. Hound works Huntington Beach like a machine, and he tries to get Ike to become part of the driving force. "[Y]ou can work on this town just like it was an engine," Hound tells Ike. "You can make it work for you, make it do what you want it to. And you don’t have to get greasy doing it. You don’t have to get shoved around..."

As one would expect, there are connections between all of the characters that run far deeper than they first appear. Tensions and conflicts that have lain dormant for decades resurface when Ike starts digging into the surfing culture. Hound Adams and Preston go a long way back, and there might even be murder in their shared history. At the same time, Nunn spices up the novel with vivid descriptions of the contemporary California coastline and spray-in-your-face surfing scenes. His characters speak of an older, more "pure" time in the state and the sport, before both became overhyped and commercialized.

In a key scene, Ike, surfing alone on a deserted beach, experiences a wave-riding epiphany:

Paddling out, catching rides, setting up. Suddenly it was all one act, one fluid series of motions, one motion even. Everything coming together until it was all one thing: the birds, the porpoise, the leaves of seaweed catching sunlight through the water, all one thing and he was one with it ... Not just tapping the source, but of the source ... He thought of the pier, the crowds fighting for waves, the entire zoo of a town crouched on the sand and what had once passed as hunger and vitality had only a certain desperateness about it now, coke-out fatigue, because they had all lost and it was one great bummer, one long drop with no way back over the top.

Like the young Wart in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Ike is puny and vulnerable at the beginning. His quest seems insurmountable and the forces ranged against him are formidable. Few things work out right for him at first, and he screws up far more than he succeeds. He learns how easy it is to compromise and give in to an encompassing moral apathy. But just as Wart matures into King Arthur, Ike becomes a force to be reckoned with by the end of the novel.

With equal parts Endless Summer and Raymond Chandler, Tapping the Source is perhaps the ultimate beach read. The writing is crisp and fresh, Ike is likable, and, hey, Elmore Leonard and Robert Stone blurb it, so Nunn must be doing something right. It may be too late to put it in your bag for this summer, but snatch it up and save it for next year. Or pull it out in winter’s chill for a vicarious trip to the surfside. You don’t even need to ride the waves to enjoy it.

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Scott H. Urban lives for words. Reading, writing, reviewing, editing ... if it has words, he's working with it.

His stories and poems have appeared throughout the small press and in mainstream markets. He edits the poetry zine FRISSON and teaches high school English in southeastern North Carolina. New fiction is scheduled to appear in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Chiaroscuro, and New Traditions In Terror