The Lobster Kings: A Novel

Image of The Lobster Kings: A Novel
Release Date: 
May 23, 2014
Publisher/Imprint: 
W. W. Norton & Company
Pages: 
352
Reviewed by: 

The Lobster Kings is well worth a summer read; in fact, it’s likely the reader will want to devour it again and again.”

The sea as a source of life and death, the maker of cads and kings is an important theme of Alexi Zentner’s new novel The Lobster Kings.

In the 300-plus years since the first Kings, Brumfitt, made his permanent home on Loosewood Island, the Kings family has never lost its grip on their rocky throne. Through good times and bad, the residents of the close-knit island have turned to a Kings for advice and decisions: “. . . everybody understood that the Kings’ word was the final word . . . the few times he (Wood Kings) settled a matter, it was settled.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Woody Kings is the final arbiter of what to do when a meth smuggling operation moves onto his island. As his health fails, it falls to his oldest daughter and likely heir, Cordelia, to stave off the smugglers, placate her sisters, and persevere to the end.

There is a strong and acknowledged link between The Lobster Kings and King Lear, and it goes beyond the name Cordelia. There is a curious playfulness in the way Zentner invokes a classic, only to have his characters play against type.

Woody, though he is a king of his world is not the attention seeking dilettante Shakespeare created; Cordelia is not a paragon of forbearance. Both characters are richly drawn from beginning to end, having both the positive and negative character traits that make them live and breathe. Their interactions and especially Cordelia’s Shakespeare-like devotion to her father and how he would run his life are the heart of this novel.

A second strength of The Lobster Kings is Zentner’s effective use of the imagery from Brumfitt’s paintings. Zentner uses discussions of the Kings’ long-gone ancestor’s history and his works as foreshadowing, exposition, and symbolism. It is a neat way to advance the story without bogging down the narrative and is very effective.

Less effective is the budding romance between Cordelia and her sternman. In the midst of the sturm and drang of this family and community drama, it falls somewhat flat. The single love scene becomes unintentionally humorous in its depiction of clichéd sex-role shifting; simply making the man the reluctant partner is still a cliché.

There are also a few frustrating issues with repetition—a scene repeated either with slightly different wording or exposed through later dialogue. These few instances seemed to be a waste of words and slowed down the passages in which they occurred.

Still, these are small things in an overridingly strong novel. Alexi Zentner’s The Lobster Kings is a thought provoking novel that challenges one to question whether belief in what “must” happen can limit what “can” happen in life.

In a brief, enlightening passage, Cordelia tosses off an observation about the island to which the “Kings had chained themselves.” And maybe that’s where Shakespeare’s Lear has the last word: Kingship, his Lear found, was more than worship; it was obligation. The Lobster Kings is well worth a summer read; in fact, it’s likely the reader will want to devour it again and again.