THE WOODEN SEA by Jonathan Carroll

Finished Th 11/30/17

I got this novel and FROM THE TEETH OF AN ANGEL from Amazon (the first time I had two items wrapped together) after reading AFTER SILENCE.

The first third of this novel really blew me away, but it got just too complicated to be believed. It's designed to be 'unbelievable', but there is a limit.

It's set in upstate New York and kicks off when the town's chief of police, Frannie McCabe is visited by a three legged pit bull, Old Vertue. The dog seems to be attracted to the chief, and when the dog drops dead, Frannie buries him, but the dog resurrects. And, this jump starts a series of extraordinary and audacious adventures that involve time travel, aliens, and otherworldly beings.

"Is it mischief or metaphysical"?

"How do you row a boat on a wooden sea"? This is kind of a zen koan that really is not answered. The best guess is that if the sea is wooden, you would just walk away. Or maybe the question is not 'sea', but 'C'.

From a review on Publishers Weekly and I fully agree-

"Immensely popular abroad, Carroll (The Marriage of Sticks) has yet to achieve commensurate stature on his native shore. His latest novel combines George Perec's pleasure in puzzles and Philip Dick's interest in metaphysics. Frannie McCabe is the 47-year-old police chief of Crane's View, N.Y., who one day adopts an old, three-legged stray dog. This is typical of his style, as his wife, Magda, recognizes: "The more goofy they are, the more you like them, huh, Fran?" The dog, Old Vertue, dies; the weirdness begins when McCabe tries to bury him. The burial is interrupted by a report about the perpetually battling Schiavo couple, who seem to have tidied up and abandoned their usually squalid house. McCabe's investigation of the domicile turns up a bizarrely patterned feather which, along with the dog's carcass, reappears in the trunk of Magda's car the next day, spooking McCabe. Even spookier, Pauline, McCabe's stepdaughter, now has a tattoo that exactly matches the feather. Then McCabe's world turns surreal: he is visited by his teenage self. The adolescent McCabe, who had been a notorious delinquent, leads his older self to Astropel, a black extraterrestrial. The aliens know Crane's View has some connection to the cosmic puzzle of the universe itself, but they need McCabe to figure out the specifics. Astropel shuttles Frannie back and forth in time, piling up such clues as a maniac Dutch millionaire from 2030 and a koan ("How do you row a boat on a wooden sea?") pronounced by a dead high school girl. Carroll's best set piece shows McCabe watching Crane's View physically fast forward from the '60s to the '90s.

"Although the story's resolution is weaker than its build up, this wonderfully offbeat novel will further augment Carroll's growing reputation as the pop writer's pop writer".