Finally, a fictionalized look at BP oil spill, and ‘Pearce Oysters’ pulls no

“Pearce Oysters” by Joselyn Takacs, Zibby Books, 384 pages

Close readers of Louisiana-based fiction might have been wondering about the absence of novels centered on 2010’s BP oil spill.

Hollywood released a ruggedly true-to-life, not to mention star-studded, account of the offshore drilling rig’s blowout with 2016’s “Deepwater Horizon.” And there have been plenty of nonfiction narratives detailing the largest marine oil spill’s devastating effects on the Gulf of Mexico.

But as we near the event’s 15th anniversary, the fiction shelf has sat empty. Anyone familiar with the ever-expanding stack of Hurricane Katrina fiction knows that literature loves a human-made disaster.

Takacs seeks to remedy that absence with her debut novel, “Pearce Oysters,” a fierce and loving portrait of two brothers and their attempts to save a floundering family oyster company during this moment of crisis.

Stoic older brother Jordan struggles to fill the shrimping boots of his father, Al Pearce, a recently deceased giant in the small world of Gulf Coast oystering.

Living with his mother in a subtly fictionalized Lafourche Parish, Jordan wears his father’s undersized dress shirts, their buttons pulling tight at the fabric. Down to just one boat and a single deckhand, the third-generation family business has seen sunnier days, when, on April 22, a massive oil slick from the Deepwater Horizon begins spreading coastward, right toward Jordan’s oyster beds.

Jordan knows Benny won’t be of much help. His black sheep brother lives the bohemian lifestyle in New Orleans as a pot-smoking musician and part-time anarchist activist. Al’s succession named his sons as co-partners in the oyster business, guaranteeing Benny a salary despite the fact that he hasn’t stepped foot on a boat since he was 14.

Jordan remains more concerned with cutting Benny off than he is about the oil spill.

“We see a spill every year,” Jordan says during a rare family dinner reunion with his brother. “Oil companies are always going to cut corners. Always have. Gulf’s been oiled since they found it.”

Their father even chewed on washed-up tar balls like bubblegum, so he claimed. Benny, meanwhile, joins an anti-BP protest on the streets of the French Quarter before prodigal son-ing himself back home to support his brother.

A Virginia native long residing on the West Coast, Takacs interviewed more than a dozen Louisiana seafood insiders affected by the oil spill for a project sponsored by the Baylor University Institute for Oral History in 2015.

She does a stellar job of gleaning concrete details from their lives to advance the plot. At times, though, Takacs belies an unfamiliarity with the minutiae of Louisiana life.

She has a habit of using the nonvernacular word “upstate,” as in “they were headed two hours upstate to a town outside of Baton Rouge.” (A simple “north” would do, or, as a friend from neighboring Terrebonne Parish tells me “above the pine curtain.”)

But the Pearce brothers do experience the dark days that summed up the summer of 2010, just as I remember them. Black plumes of smoke on the horizon, the reek of burning oil.

Rumors of dolphins washed up on Grand Isle, pictures of tar ball-sown shorelines. Dead pelicans, our state symbol, crudely drowned in oil.

The litany of engineering Hail Marys: containment dome, top hat, junk shot, concrete relief wells. BP CEO Tony Hayward telling the press, “This was not our accident.”

At their local watering hole, Jordan and his trusty deckhand, Doug Babies, antagonize two oceanographers on BP’s payroll who tell them not to worry about the oil dispersant Corexit being sprayed on the Gulf’s surface by the U.S. Air Force.

“It’s soap, basically,” one scientist vainly assures. “Like Dawn dish soap.” The oystermen know better. We all knew better.

Two weeks later, at a community meeting held in the brothers’ former high school gymnasium, a marine toxicologist who studies the effects of the Exxon Valdez…