Tijuana Straits

About the Author:

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.

He has collaborated with HBO Producer David Milch on the show Deadwood and with Milch co-produced the HBO series John from Cincinnati, a surfing series set in Imperial Beach, California which premiered on June 10, 2007.

Review

"Sam Fahey, an ex-con and ex-surfer now running a worm farm, is tracking a pack of feral dogs in the Tijuana River Valley when he encounters a badly beaten Mexican woman stumbling across the dunes near Tijuana Straits, a legendary surf spot. But surfing is only a backdrop in Nunn's intense, beautifully written literary thriller; the novel's real subject is the lawless U.S.-Mexico border, and its real story revolves around three damaged lives: the Mexican refugee, an activist named Magdalena Rivera fighting for economic and environmental justice in industrial Tijuana; Armando Santoya, whose life spirals into a drug-fueled rage when his baby is poisoned by the toxic chemicals his wife works with; and Fahey himself, a fully realized antihero struggling to atone for his own troubled life. In a series of long flashbacks, Nunn relates their backstories — along with the painful history of a rugged chunk of the Southern California coast — setting the stage for a powerful, visceral denouement. The novel is an elegy of lost innocence, an exploration of the corrupting power of greed and progress on the land and the people, but its triumph is the complete integration of character and plot. This is a sad but deeply satisfying and intensely moving story. With this fifth novel, Nunn has written a terrific book that more than affirms the promise of his early work.

When Fahey, once a great surfer, now a reclusive ex-con, meets Magdalena, she is running from a pack of wild dogs along the ragged wasteland where California and Mexico meet the Pacific Ocean — a spot once known to the men who rode its giant waves as the Tijuana Straits. Magdalena has barely survived an attack that forced her to flee Tijuana, and Fahey takes her in. That he is willing to do so runs contrary to his every instinct, for Fahey is done with the world, seeking little more than solitude from this all-but-forgotten corner of the Golden State. Nor is Fahey a stranger to the lawless ways of the border. He worries that in sheltering this woman he may not only be inviting further entanglements but may be placing them both at risk. In this, he is not wrong.

An environmental activist, Magdalena has become engaged in the struggle for the health and rights of the thousands of peasants streaming from Mexico's enervated heartland to work in the maquilladoras — the foreign-owned factories that line her country's border, polluting its air and fouling its rivers. It is a risky contest. Danger can come from many directions, from government officials paid to preserve the status quo to thugs hired to intimidate reformers.
As Magdalena and Fahey become closer, Magdalena tries to discover who is out to get her, attempting to reconstruct the events that delivered her, battered and confused, into Fahey's strange yet oddly seductive world. She examines every lead, never guessing the truth. For into this no-man's-land between two countries comes a trio of killers led by Armando Santoya, a man beset by personal tragedy, an aberration born of the very conditions Magdalena has dedicated her life to fight against, yet who in the throes of his own drug-fueled confusions has marked her for death. And so will Fahey be put to the test, in a final duel on the beaches of his Tijuana Straits.