The Seaplane on Final Approach by Rebecca Rukeyser
Monday, June 6, 2022 at 6:25AM 
Published by Doubleday on June 7, 2022
Mira is attracted to sleaze. In fact, she’s obsessed with sleaze. Her very proper parents send her to Alaska for the summer when she’s 17. They hope Mira’s aunt will teach their wayward daughter the value of hard work. Mira is not a delinquent but she’s a poor student who lacks ambition. Her hidden ambition is to master the concept of sleaze, which seems to Mira to have “something to do with excess.” The job allows her to meet her stepcousin Ed, whose missing tooth inspires her sleazy masturbatory fantasies. She only sees Ed during a four-day period, but that’s enough to trigger fantasies of an erotic life together.
Mira returns to Alaska when she’s 18, having flunked out of high school. She takes a job as a baker at Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge. Only a handful of characters live at the resort. Stu and Maureen own the place. Polly and Erin are recent high school graduates who guide guests on their wilderness adventures. A taciturn chef who grumbles about insufficient supplies rounds out the staff.
Maureen likes to tell guests about the virtues of living in God’s country. Stu, who is having an affair with Erin after starting one with Polly, is less interested in virtuous living. Polly is bummed because she came to Alaska with the expectation that the affair would continue. Maureen is bummed, although she usually tries not to show it, because she knows what Stu is doing. The chef has a problem with anger and alcohol. Mira repeats the phrase “soft sweater” over and over when she’s having a panic attack. Each character disintegrates a bit each day as the long summer moves toward darkness until, at the novel’s end, the pace of the disintegration escalates.
Mira spends her days baking, cleaning, dumping trash into the ocean (an odd choice for an eco-lodge), and serving guests. When she’s not working, she’s usually masturbating to fantasies of Ed, fantasies that she revises while imagining them, improving the story as it leads to her climax. Oddly, Mira is probably the most emotionally healthy of the resort’s staff members. Guests, watching the staff interact, sometimes wonder whether they’ve chosen a poor vacation destination.
The reader learns that Mira is now an adult. She is recounting this story from her past, filling in details from the present — Erin’s marriage, Polly’s adoption of a dog after visiting Thailand — that she seems to have gleaned from Facebook. When details are scarce, she uses her imagination to fill the gaps.
The sleaze theme doesn’t work very well, in part because Mira never quite grasps the meaning of sleaze. She learns that sleaze cannot be hunted because it only finds the wholesome. Maybe that means that only the wholesome recognize sleaze as sleazy. I'm not sure what, if anything, the reader should take from Mira's musings about sleaze, apart from the groundwork they lay for Mira's frantic masturbation.
Despite not quite following Mira’s thoughts about sleaze, I admire Rebecca Rukeyser’s creativity. Later in Mira’s life, an addict will compare morphine to a high school snow day, when a teen can anticipate sleeping late before savoring porn during a leisurely afternoon. That's a clever comparison. The contrast between Mira’s genuine and Maureen’s feigned sunniness is amusing, as are the triggers for Mira’s fantasies (thinking about something that Ed might have touched once or looking up his name in the phone book are sufficiently stimulating to get her off). The novel’s increasing darkness is offset by Mira’s steadiness, her refusal to succumb to the fear of bears or jellyfish or unrequired desire. Readers who appreciate the unexpected will find much to appreciate in The Seaplane on Final Approach.
RECOMMENDED