"The North Line" by Matt Riordan “The North Line” By Matt Riordan; Hyperion Avenue, 2024; 313 pages; $27.99. In the first pages of this novel about a greenhorn’s Bristol Bay fishing season, the young man pushes a skiff off the beach and ends up in the water himself.
He’s warned by his crewmates that he “broke the cardinal rule. You don’t ever go in the water.” Like the narrative principle known as “Chekhov’s gun,” this loaded gun returns at the end of the novel in a dramatic fashion, but not as a reader might have imagined.
Adam, a college student at a prestigious East Coast college has lost his lacrosse-based scholarship for a drug offense and, with a connection from a fellow student, arrives in Alaska with a plan to earn enough fishing money to pay his senior-year tuition and then get on with his life. As a greenhorn, he doesn’t get his pick of boat or skipper but accepts what’s offered — with all the low-on-the-totem-pole duties that go with the job. Once, when he’s ordered to do something both unethical and illegal, he’s told, “I don’t tell you to do something because I want to discuss it.
This isn’t a democracy.” First, on a wreck of a gillnet boat, Adam fishes Togiak herring with two characters very unlike the kind of people he’s known in his conventional life and elite school; then he fishes salmon with a cruel and unscrupulous skipper. The salmon season is complicated by a fishermen’s strike for higher prices.
(The book is set.