I am not, nor have I ever been, a surfer. I have never waded more than knee-deep into California's Pacific waters; I rarely, if ever, call other men "dude"; and, as a skeptical couch dweller, I experience spasms of embarrassment when I hear the term "action sports." So I ought to hate Daniel Duane's surfing memoirs, Caught Inside ... right?

Capital "W" wrong. As it turns out, this book is an ideal piece of nonfiction: First I found myself intrigued by it, then fascinated, then genuinely engrossed. This was doubly unexpected, given the thinness of the book's premise: A Berkeley slacker, left behind by his careerist friends and slouching toward 30, picks up on a whim and moves to Santa Cruz (the undisputed mecca of California beach-hippie lifestyle) to spend a year earnestly surfing.

It's quite a testament to Duane's talent and vision that any book at all could grow from such sandy soil, even more a book of real brilliance. His narrative, like the waves that propel it, has no particular beginning or end; his characters are subordinate to the sport that consumes them; and by the end of Duane's surfing year, it's hard to say whether anything concrete has happened at all. But along the way, Duane treats his readers to an absolutely calm, almost mystical vision of coastal California: its culture and history, its weather, waves, and wildlife, and of course, its favorite native sons - the surfers.

Did you think surfers were dumb? Duane is living proof to the contrary. Did you think they were cool? Duane is living proof that they are. Whether his topic is Hawaiian royalty, great white sharks, '60s surf films, or just the trudge back to his pickup after a session with the waves, Duane's writing reflects his surfer's soul - freed and steadied by long afternoons on the water. (And to better serve you info-junkies, he spent all the rainy days studying up on everything ever written about surfing.)

A mean-spirited reader could pick on Duane's harmless California-isms - his compulsive references to herbal teas, designer coffees, and organic vegetables - but I'm happy to indulge him in such local flavor. The fact that Duane is a supersaturated California native means that Caught Inside is, appropriately and absolutely, the work of an insider; and his book is as spontaneously organic as the artichokes he and his surfer pals eat off a handmade cedar table.