GRAVESEND LIGHT

Payne returns to the North Carolina landscape of Early from the Dance (1983) and Ruin Creek (1993) for a labored melodrama set in the Outer Banks: The Prince of Tides meets The Perfect Storm—a painful family history and problematic love affair culminating in a hurricane-force gale.

In 1983, Joe Madden, an earnest 28-year-old anthropologist, returns to his childhood summer home in Little Roanoke to make an ethnographic study of the insular fishing community that has survived there for more than 200 years. He falls in love with Dr. Day Shaughnessy, an opinionated OB/GYN whose performance of abortions at a local clinic often brings her into conflict with the more conservative natives. Simultaneously, Joe signs as crewman on the fishing boat Father’s Price, where he befriends and then alienates another member of the crew, a sardonic ex-con named Ray Bristow. Payne alternates Joe’s third-person adventures at sea with Day’s first-person story of Joe’s gradual maturing from a thoughtful if often emotionally uninvolved man into someone more truthful and decisive. Before that transformation can occur, however, there will be a crisis in the form of Day’s unexpected pregnancy—how will a woman who counsels others about abortion face her own pregnancy? And how will Joe respond? There’s nothing like a storm at sea to resolve these questions: Joe realizes he wants Day to keep the baby after all; he and Ray come to a final understanding; and Day makes a decision about her baby while awaiting news of Joe’s fate.

Payne’s portrait of Little Roanoke’s fishing community is rich and convincing. And he has a marvelous character in Bristow: a complex, embittered man who masks his essential decency under a veneer of bigotry and toughness. Too bad his main players are so much less fascinating.