In 'Wrack and Ruin,' outlandish extremes are the norm

Don Lee centers his new novel on two brothers, one a Brussels sprouts farmer and part-time welder, the other an indicted financier turned producer of cheesy martial arts remakes. (Michele McDonald/Globe Staff/File 2004)

Wrack and Ruin
By Don Lee, Norton, 333 pp., $23.95

It's unfortunate that it's easier to sell film rights to novels than it is to sell original screenplays. One result is books that sometimes seem like way-stations to the big screen. "Wrack and Ruin," Don Lee's broadly slapstick, satirical novel about two antipathetic brothers, is a case in point, a book that seems to want to be a movie.

Along with a hyperactive plot that features continuous calamities, Lee conjures a photogenic coastal setting and a cast of camera-friendly, offbeat characters whose lives involve dramatic ups and downs.

Lyndon Song, a renowned sculptor, fled the overwhelming New York art scene 17 years earlier to become a Brussels sprouts farmer and part-time welder in Rosarita Bay, a small, misty town an hour south of San Francisco. A marijuana-toking misanthrope, he was looking for peace and solitude, drawn to "the town's reputation as a developer's graveyard." Rosarita Bay, a fictionalized version of Half Moon Bay, Calif., was also the setting for Lee's 2001 collection of stories, "Yellow," about relations between Americans of varied Asian descent. His 2004 novel, "Country of Origin," also about Asian-American identity, was set in Tokyo in 1980.

Peace, alas, is elusive - especially after a developer with flagrant disregard for the environment wins approval to build a hotel, conference center, and golf course along prime oceanfront property. Lyndon's 20 acres sit "smack between the parcels for the hotel and golf course, meaning he was being pestered incessantly by attorneys and various developer minions, offering him ever more ridiculous sums of money to vacate."

Enter his crass older brother, Woody, an indicted financier turned producer of trashy martial arts film remakes - and "a magnet for disaster." Naturally, funding for his next movie hinges on convincing his recalcitrant brother to sell out. He arrives with an over-the-hill Hong Kong kung fu diva in tow, just in time for Rosarita's Labor Day Chili and Chowder cook-off and a heap of high jinks.

Why are the Song brothers so out of tune? Lyndon is still furious with Woody for bilking their parents out of their life savings to keep him from prison. As for Woody, he's terrified of hitting bottom again, "living among bums, . . . winos, junkies and whores, Jesus freaks, . . . the dregs, the bottom of the barrel." This is a man whose definition of hell is working in retail and not being able to afford designer labels, an operator who believes that "there was no human interaction that wasn't, at its core, a transaction."

Woody is a singularly tedious caricature. He's meant to be annoying, in order to enable us to enjoy his wild brushes with death by quicksand, drowning, shark attack, and elephant stampede as his just desserts. But he shouldn't be so uninteresting.

Lee, formerly the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares, lays it all on thick, with compulsive verbal riffs and breathless pacing. Far more compelling than the multiple concussions and contusions, however, is a scene in which Woody spies on snowy plover chicks with two field biologists determined to save the endangered species.

This rare quiet interlude seems to have migrated from a much better novel.

"Wrack and Ruin," on the other hand, is a madcap action movie with a comic-book sensibility - in prose. Like Ron Hansen's "Isn't It Romantic?" (2003) and Robert Hellenga's "Philosophy Made Simple" (2006), Lee's novel is meant to be charming and funny. The trouble is, it's in the wrong medium, a cleverly engineered entertainment whose well-oiled gears fail to engage on the page.

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for newspapers.