Humans versus nature is a fight we’ll never fully win, even though we’re giving it our darndest. But that struggle can make for some good storytelling, no matter where or what the nature in question is. In Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall, “nature” means both natural forces and the fauna that occupy them.
Jay Gardiner and his dad, a legendary local diver, have never had a good relationship. Throughout Jay’s life, his dad expected him to turn into a Mini Mitt, and rode him much harder, mostly about diving, than his two sisters. As a kid, Jay tried to please his dad; as a teenager, he grew resentful. Finally, after an explosive fight, Jay leaves. A couple years and a pandemic later, Mitt is dead from stepping into the sea with weighted pockets rather than face the slow demise of his fatal cancer diagnosis. A year later, Jay sneaks himself and diving gear to the bay where Mitt died to retrieve his father’s bones from wherever they are on the seabed.
In Jay’s defense, he knows what he’s doing is idiotic and impossible, and that’s before he meets the giant squid. Both curiosity and fear come at seeing the creature at such a shallow depth. Jay realizes too late it has come so high because it’s running away from a whale, which indiscriminately swallows squid and diver alike. Alive but in the belly of the whale, Jay has an hour of oxygen to fight the whale’s digestion process and figure out a way to survive. Worst yet is that it seems like to escape, he’s going to have to come to terms with his dad in ways he never wanted or expected.
Whalefall is billed as a survival thriller like The Martian, but that creates some false expectations. The action in The Martian starts right away, and Andy Weir’s Mark Watney is focused primarily on his survival, with how he got there and his feelings about his life peppered into the main survival narrative. In Whalefall, the relationship between Jay and Mitt is the binding agent for everything else—Jay doesn’t get swallowed by his whale until nearly halfway through the book. This is a criticism more of the marketing of this book than the book itself, because what the book actually is, is a novel-length version of the “Men will literally do X instead of going to therapy” meme.
I joke, but only a little.
While Jay’s mom and sisters go to therapy, he ignores their pleas for him to do the same, and recognizes his actions as trying to gain “closure” on something too difficult for him to process well on his own. In the water, and especially in the whale, he is utterly alone except for his thoughts. The anger that has been propelling him for the last few years of couch-surfing is a liability under these circumstances. He has to deal with the paradox that was Mitt Gardiner, and the gulf that separated his public persona from the one Jay knew. He has to reckon with the ways he’s not as different from his dad as he wants to believe, and that everything his dad forced him to learn is now vital to save his life.
Are there better times and places to work these things out than far below the surface of the Pacific? A few. Are there better ways to gain a sense of closure and honor his father than making a dangerous dive to look for bones that could have been scattered any number of places by months of tides and predation? Perhaps. But Jay’s still a teenager, so he can have a little slack for being a knucklehead. Just a little.
This is a book about survival in improbable circumstances. But it’s mostly a book about a difficult parent-child relationship, and how hard it can be to separate the good intentions and lessons from the bad execution or clash in personalities.
Ring Reads 