“Supersonic” by Thomas Kohnstamm
Counterpoint – 400 pp - $30

Love it or hate it (and recently it’s been easier to hate than to love), Seattle – the largest city in the Pacific Northwest – seems to cycle through booms and busts almost as fast as Taylor Swift goes through costume changes or Leonardo DiCaprio goes through girlfriends.

In his third book, “Supersonic,” Thomas Kohnstamm creates a multi-layered time frame to write about this phenomenon

“Supersonic” is a work of fiction that centers on one particular hilltop in Seattle. The author introduces several generations of characters who inhabit that community  over a span of about 170 years – almost since the beginning of the white settlement on the shores of what is now called Elliott Bay. The characters play roles in an intertwining continuum of dreams hatched, promises made, betrayals suffered, disappointments weathered, and hope haphazardly advanced.

Just as the story is not told exclusively through the lens of the white settler perspective, it also is not told chronologically. It does begin, however, in 1856 to focus on a formative event as experienced by a Duwamish youth, Si’sia. This boy’s family refuses to capitulate to the United States even after a government agent comes through with big talk and convinces Chief Seattle to appease the invading white settlers by signing a treaty that gives up land that his people have lived on Since Time Immemorial.

Other chapters bounce around to center on a Japanese-American family whose Nisei and Sansei generations still bear the scars of generational trauma after their elders endured incarceration as “lesser” Americans during World War II.

A 19th century, opium-addled con man is woven into this mix, as is a 21st century stay-at-home, disabled dad whose half-baked scheme for hitting pay dirt is dependent on his winning one of the first recreational marijuana retail licenses being handed out by the Washington State Liquor Control Board.

And the “Supersonic” title derives from dishonorably discharged Navy seaman Larry Dugdale’s job at the Boeing Airplane Company. Larry is rebuilding his life after getting hired to work as a mechanic on the Boeing Airplane Company’s supersonic transport – destined to be the dominant means of air travel in the 21st century.

But transactional politics and brash capitalism, which prevail over so much of these people’s lives, don’t always deliver on destiny.

Kohnstamm’s characters are figuring this all out in internal monologues of abashment and fretfulness that are likely to elicit moments of laugh-out-loud empathy from the reader.

The characters struggle through failed loves and foiled liaisons. There’s racism entangled with class division. Economic and political boom and bust cycles are the unreliable “warp” that snarls up people’s pie-in-the-sky dreams and emotional well-being – the “weft.”

And yet, this colorful tapestry of a plot holds together, and ultimately honors humanity over hubris.

Quick note to readers who, like this reviewer, cannot boast steel-trap minds: I encourage you to take the time to go back and re-read sections in order to appreciate how marvelously the author connects plot points and raises story themes from beginning to end.

       

The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this weekly column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Pacific Northwest. Contact her at bkmonger@nwlink.com