On a wave

"A disenchanted, unemployed English professor decides one day on a whim - partly playful, partly desperate - to sneak off from his temp job in Manhattan and catch a wave off a dingy Queens shoreline. How did he become this semidepressed, chain-smoking, aimless man, when for a few shining years of his childhood he was invincible?". "The boy is Thad Ziolkowski, who grows up amid the late '60s counterculture in coastal Florida. After his parents' divorce, nine-year-old Thad escapes from his difficult family - notably a brooding and explosive new stepfather - by heading for the thrilling,…