I finished reading James Patterson and Quinn O’Connell Jr’s novel “Roughnecks” last night. I remember the principal author James Patterson when he was one half of the Pheromones, a very polished, satirical folk rock duo that performed in the DC area in …was it the 90’s? “Roughnecks” (2014, Alan Squire Publishing) is about a young man from the east coast trying to find out who he really is while working on oil drilling platforms in the Williston basin (Western North Dakota and eastern Montana). We know at the onset of the story that the central character, Zack Harper, is in some way trying to reinvent himself as a roughneck, in the classic American tradition of second acts.
The “secondary” characters, Zack’s oil derrick coworkers, are all solidly portrayed and very credible. So is the world they inhabit, with its terrifyingly unpredictable dangers. It’s a place where young, sometimes troubled men coax massively heavy, suspended sections of drilling pipe into position, so the driller can get the drill turning “to the right” or downward into the earth. Patterson and O’Connell Jr have the look and feel of this world down: the open spaces and immense skies, the harsh beauty of the landscape, the small, scattered desolate towns, and the drilling platforms themselves. They also have an ear for the special language of this world: newbies are called “worms,” getting initial training is called “being broken out,” and leaving a job is called “twisting off,” which perhaps, not coincidentally, describes how sections of drilling pipe are separated.
If I have a quibble about the novel it’s that the prose seem to falter at times when attempting to portray Zack’s inner world. There were a few passages dealing with Zack’s internal life that left me scratching my head. At times, I wished Patterson had given us a bit more about Zack’s life back east. And, at times, “Roughnecks” feels like a part of a larger, unfinished whole. Nevertheless, I regard these as minor failings within a largely successful novel. For me, the chance to enter into this alien, forbidding world without risking a digit was well worth the price of admission. And I now know much more about the human beings and technology upstream of the gas pump.
Also, the book has one of the coolest back and front covers I’ve ever seen.
