Chance: A Novel
Kem Nunn, 2014
Scribner
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743289245
Summary
From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author comes a suspenseful and mind-bending novel about Eldon Chance, a forensic neuropsychiatrist at the end of his rope.
A dark tale involving psychiatric mystery, sexual obsession, fractured identities, and terrifyingly realistic violence—Chance is set amid the back streets of California’s Bay Area, far from the cleansing breezes of the ocean. Dr. Eldon Chance, a neuropsychiatrist, is a man primed for spectacular ruin.
Into Dr. Chance’s blighted life walks Jaclyn Blackstone, the abused, attractive wife of an Oakland homicide detective, a violent and jealous man. Jaclyn appears to be suffering from a dissociative identity disorder. In time, Chance will fall into bed with her—or is it with her alter ego, the voracious and volatile Jackie Black? The not-so-good doctor, despite his professional training, isn’t quite sure—and thereby hangs his fascination with her.
Meanwhile, Chance also meets a young man named D, a self-styled, streetwise philosopher skilled in the art of the blade. It is around this trio of unique and dangerous individuals that long guarded secrets begin to unravel, obsessions grow, and the doctor’s carefully arranged life comes to the brink of implosion.
Amid San Francisco’s fluid, ever-shifting fog, in the cool, gray city of love, Dr. Chance will at last be forced to live up to his name. Chance is a twisted, harrowing, and impossible-to-put-down head trip through the fun house of fate, mesmerizing until the very last page. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Raised—Pomona, California, USA
• Education—M.F.A., University of California, Irvine
• Currently—lives in southern California
Kem Nunn is an American fiction novelist, surfer, magazine and television writer from California. His novels have been described as "surf-noir" for their dark themes, political overtones and surf settings. He is the author of five novels, including his seminal surf novel Tapping the Source and, more recently, Chance. According to the San Diego Union Tribune:
He remembers being mesmerized the first time he saw surfers while camping with his parents at Salt Creek near Dana Point.
Although Nunn was a skinny, not-so-athletic kid who didn't swim very well, the allure of being propelled by waves was irresistible. His first rides were on air mats and crude homemade surfboards. He merely dabbled with surfing as a youth. It wasn't until he was deep into his 20s that he became immersed in the surfer's life.
He drifted from his teens into his 20s, turning underachieving into an art decades before eternal slacking became fashionable with Generation X.
"My 20s were a lost decade. I didn't do much of anything," he said.
—Terry Rodgers, San Diego Union Tribune, August 17, 2004
Nunn has collaborated with producer David Milch on the HBO Western drama series Deadwood. Milch and Nunn co-created the HBO series John from Cincinnati, a surfing series set in Imperial Beach, California which premiered in 2007.
Kem Nunn grew up in Pomona and Northern California. In addition to Tapping the Source (1984), he also wrote Dogs of Winter (1997), Unassigned Territory (1986), Pomona Queen (1992), Tijuana Straits (2004), and Chance (2014). He received an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/15/2014 .)
Book Reviews
Kem Nunn's crafty new novel…Chance takes place in the twilit world of noir, where people and things are never what they seem. But this book isn't a tragic noir like Vertigo or Out of the Past, whose cunning femme fatale Jaclyn/Jackie sometimes brings to mind. It's a farce, of an unusually violent and dark-spirited kind…Nunn, a connoisseur of slippery slopes, just gives his uptight protagonist a gentle shove and watches him go down, every bump and stumble duly noted with a sort of dry relish
Terrence Rafferty - New York Times Book Review
Is it too much to compare Kem Nunn to Raymond Chandler? Like Chandler, Nunn’s great subject is what lies beneath the surface, the desolation that infuses us at every turn.... The power of this disturbing and provocative novel is that it leaves us unmoored among the signposts of a morally ambiguous universe in which, even after we have finished reading, it is uncertain who has been feeding whom.
Los Angeles Times
Sentence by sentence Nunn achieves a muscular eloquence—I almost wrote elegance—unusual in what at first appears to be a genre novel. There hasn't been fiction this good about a San Francisco medical professional gone off the rails over a woman since Frank Norris' deluded dentist in the 1899 novel McTeague.
Alan Cheuse - San Francisco Chronicle
The book could be considered a pulp masterpiece. It has everything from a femme fatale to a dystopian setting where the California sun is blotted out by a black-ash fog from wildfires burning around the Bay. Chance is the kind of everyman whose bad choices are noir staples. But calling it pulp would undersell the sheer genius of the writing, which uses the convention of mystery-thrillers to create a psychological allegory of Freud’s construct, id, ego and superego at war with themselves.
Arizona Republic
(Starred review.) [A] brilliant and cerebral psychological thriller. The quiet, ordered life of Dr. Eldon Chance, a recently divorced Bay Area forensic neuropsychiatrist, begins to unravel when he makes a series of ill-fated decisions.... [A]surprising conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
Psychiatrist Eldon Chance, who makes his living providing testimony in court cases, is appalled to see the life he had so carefully constructed for himself break apart.... Nunn...excels at creating complicated, flawed characters with fascinating backstories. This gritty, twisted tale will be of prime interest to noir fans. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
[G]ritty.... Nunn, a writer with a gift for subtlety and wordplay, spins a story that is both mesmerizing and a bit confusing. Readers will find Nunn's story well-written for the most part but not always engaging. Lovers of Nunn's previous novels may discover in Chance a less than creditable antihero.
Kirkus Reviews
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