J. A. Cooper, Something About Alaska, MidnightSun, September 2022, 224 pp., RRP $19.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780987380975
J. A. Cooper’s debut novel is a richly detailed, tenderly recounted story of a fifteen-year-old boy coming to terms with his parents’ failings and failures. The great pleasure of the book is in its portraits of the three main characters: Zac, his father and Stanley.
Young Zac Greene wants, perhaps too desperately, to impress his surly father, but must also find a way to assert himself against a man who might know how to survive Alaskan winters, how to deal out violence to others, and how to drive a sled of dogs through a storm, but who doesn’t have much idea of how to make a marriage work or how to bring a son into adulthood. Stanley is a man of Eskimo origins just recently emerged from fifteen years in gaol partly because he is one of Alaska’s indigenous minority, and partly because he killed a man. He comes into the novel almost by accident, and it is he who must find a way to bring Zac back from the brink. And the brink is the physical threat of annihilation in a blizzard as much as it is the onrushing destructive inevitable clash between father and son.
J. A. Cooper has made superb use of his knowledge of Alaska, sled dogs, and Alaskan indigenous cultures to construct a novel about deeply complex feelings with simple, luminous clarity.
Highly recommended for readers from ten to fifteen. Now living in Adelaide after spending some time in the outback, perhaps J. A. Cooper will tackle a second novel set somewhere in Australia’s wild hinterland next.
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy
