Lucas "Lucky" Lunt fishes out of his father's wooden lobster boat, Wooden Nickel, and is the hard-working anti-hero of the novel of the same name. The boat, built in 1971, is in better shape than Lucky. She's had her tubes reamed and is running cool and sweet, but Lucky's own heart "starts knocking after the first string of traps and he's got to sit down and have a Marlboro and a Rolling Rock to settle it down, which means he can't haul half what he used to in a day." He's had to mortgage the house "that had been Lunt property free and clear for 100 years" to pay for the boat's rebuild and his own angioplasties.

The Wooden Nickel Little, Brown and Co., 352pp, $23.95

And if the shame of debt and the desperation of a physical man's failing body isn't enough, the litany of woes piles up as he struggles to bring his life under the veil of control. As the novel develops, "His stern man is pregnant, his wife has moved in with a bull dyke welder out at the art colony, neither of his kids will talk to him, every few hours his heart flops like a mackerel, and he's having breakfast alone on a Sunday morning at 5 a.m. Every Sunday of his married life he came down stairs to a stack of buttered blueberry pancakes; now he's listening to Tanya Tucker's "Riding out the Heartbreak" on High Country 104, having a cigarette and sharing a can of King Oscar sardines with Alfie the cat."

In short, Lucky is trapped and doomed, just like the lobsters he hauls off the ocean floor, which is not to say that the reader gives up on old Luck. The more he flails, the more we care. He is a surprisingly endearing guy for an unsympathetic everyman who offends absolutely everyone, starting with those of us who are sensitive to the "F" word and country club spelled without an "o."

But he swears eloquently. It is a large part of his impressive but unconventional repertoire of skills. He also knows marine engines of all stripes inside out. He can identify his fellow fishermen in a fog by their unique boat engine sounds on the water and their truck sounds on the land. He can call the make of a vehicle by the "slant of its headlights." He knows the topography of the bottom of his fishing territory like the road to his house. He knows the weather like a seer. And he sees the world at large from the bottom of the scrambling economic heap. His ironic, twisted bitterness is laced with a bleak humor that only can thrive in the mind of an individual whose position in the world seems close to hopeless.

Alert, aware, and intelligent Ð despite his eighth-grade education Ð Lucky's skills are nevertheless woefully lacking. He is a salty Maine coast combination of Don Quixote and Gulliver, just 10 degrees off and right on Ð but it doesn't matter. The Episcopalians from away will take over the world (or at least Lucky's part of it).

Author John Carpenter has created a vivid, larger-than-life character that the reader can't quite swallow whole. Lucky is wrapped up in metaphor a bit heavy-handedly, too frequently identifying with the lobsters he traps, likening his heart to a marine engine, and comparing his human relationships (unfavorably) with those he enjoys with his more reliable companions, machines. In fact, his exaggerated character is as far over the top as the supporting characters, especially the women, are under the radar. The wife, the kids, the girlfriend, the rich summer folk, and the frequently outrageous fellow fishermen are more like cardboard set ups, a target for Lucky's anger, than fully fledged characters.

Carpenter's language is, for the most part, finely-honed and rich and pleasurable, his observations keen Ð "they walk like they've never been on land." Lapses, however, are all the more glaring for their virtuosic surroundings. Overuse of the term "finest kind" is jarring, and he indulges occasionally in the ultra-clever phrase, "the bow É cuts the chop like a knife going through margarine." Inconsistencies of character are also troublesome. Can Lucky, an archetypal throwback of a Maine Lobsterman, really swim? As an obstreperous adherent to the morals of a bygone (better) age, would he hit a woman? If he hits his pregnant sternman, then why not his wife Ð she's a real pill?

The title, "The Wooden Nickel," resonant with the mixed connotations of pleasure and worthlessness, is provocative but unrevealing of the author's intent. Was this ambitious novel written as a parody, a social commentary, a political satire, a polemic or a black comedy? No matter how it is read, it will be hard to put down. Lucky's just that kind of guy.

Carol Standish reviews books for Points East.

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