“Night Fisher” by R. Kikuo Johnson

It’s rare that I choose to “de-select” a book by sending it to the Public Library, but this is one occasion, and it was not an easy decision. “Night Fisher” is a graphic novel about Loren Foster, a haole teen (white) living in Hawaii. His father is a dentist obsessed with maintaining the yard of their house and critical of Loren when he brings home a “B”. Loren is a good boy, but, at 17, drifting. Attempting to find some direction or meaning in his life, he reconnects with a childhood friend who is into batu (crystal meth) and begins a mild downward spiral. Respected reviewers from Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly gave it glowing reviews, and it isn’t hard to see why. There are deep metaphors here, layers that are still occurring to me days after finishing the book. The title, “Night Fisher” is only referred to in the book’s opening sequence, but the idea that this is a young man surrounded by darkness, unsure of what is out there or how to get to it, is apt. Loren asks his father how he knows about knot-tying. He asks another adult how he knows about changing tires. Loren is a young man who wants to know about things, but life seems to be eluding him. He clears out the jungle of weeds in his yard only to have it grow back again. He spends an evening with a young woman, only to have it turn sour when he can’t be honest with his classmates about the nature of their encounter. While Loren is absolutely understandable, he is also a bit of a wuss. He bounces from wanting the girl to hating the girl, from staying away from his druggie friend to committing crimes, while stoned, with the friend. The entire story is also very egocentric from Loren’s point of view. Some of the dialog is faded out, other dialog runs off the page. The message is clear. What other people have to say is unimportant, less important anyway, than what is going on in Loren’s head. And there is a lot of randomness in there. He flashes on naked breasts when discussing Las Vegas (apparently, many Hawaiians move to Las Vegas) and his father appears to do dental work on him as punishment for getting arrested. How much of this is real and how much of it is his interpretation of events is never made particularly clear. It’s not that I object to the serious tone or mature subject matter. We have many books that contain these kinds of themes. It’s that the book has no seeming moral center – the bad guy gets into M.I.T. and the good guy remains lost. That may be a fact of life, but it makes an already dicey book less defensible should someone object. This is the reality of school librarianship – you can have the edgy books, but you have to be able to defend them. As far as this book is concerned, feel free to check it out … at your neighborhood public library.