The Boston Globe reviews “Wrack and Ruin”, novel set in a town very much like Half Moon Bay.
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.
