Whalefall (Daniel Kraus)

Whalefall
Daniel Kraus
Atria Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi/Thriller
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Seventeen-year-old Jim Gardiner grew up in the shadow of professional scuba diver Mitt Gardiner, a man whose rage, expectations, and disappointment smothered the boy and drove him to run away from home at fifteen... which is why Jim wasn't there when Mitt, after a terminal cancer diagnosis, dropped himself into the waters off California's deadly Monastery Beach with diving weights in his pockets and no air. The suicide and bodyless funeral left Jim full of churning emotions and unresolved anger, a cloud that he can't seem to escape from, not helped by how his mother and sisters (and the rest of California's diving community) now see him: the coward, the failure, the kid too selfish to even visit his locally-famous father in the hospital.
Now, Jim stands on the shores of Monastery Beach, in diving gear for the first time in two years, about to brave the waters where his father died. If he can recover the bones, give his family something tangible to bury and mourn, maybe he can redeem himself in their eyes (and his own), prove that he isn't the waste of oxygen that Mitt so often made him feel like he was. But the ocean is a tricky place, even moreso to a rusty diver with a preoccupied mind. A series of mistakes and accidents, one too many boundaries pushed, and he finds himself drug into the first stomach of a massive sperm whale - and haunted by the ghostly voice of his father, who may be a hallucination or may be his only guide to survival.

REVIEW: I've heard a fair bit of buzz about this one, and the concept looked unique, so when it popped up as available via Libby I decided it was worth a listen. Unfortunately, despite the admittedly-unique concept and some very visceral imagery, the story turns into a plodding, overlong gaze into the abyss of one self-absorbed boy's navel.
Jim starts (and for quite some time remains) a young man scarred by a father who never really wanted to be a father, particularly to a boy like Jim, a sensitive kid prone to crying and who just can't seem to grasp Mitt's worldview or care about the wisdom he clumsily tries to pass on. Mitt could rarely hold onto a job for long, too outspoken and generally poor at people skills, growing increasingly reckless as life in the suburbs ground against his inherent free spirit, throwback nature. One starts to wonder why he married at all, and whether he realized he had daughters, too; there is no indication that he made any effort to pass on his homespun diving wisdom and experience to either of them (or to his wife), just that only a boy was worthy of inheriting his true passion... and that Jim, by not also being a hotheaded throwback acting out his anger at random intervals, was one disappointment too many. For Jim's part, he spent his childhood alternately coddled by his mother and yelled at by his father, the moments of true father-son bonding few and far between and only getting fewer and further between as he reached adolescence. Still, Mom and his sisters are too oblivious in their femininity to see how Mitt is traipsing right up to the emotional abuse border and stepping over it more than once, taking out his frustrations at being trapped in a life he comes to resent on the boy (if not consciously), and thus can't possibly comprehend it when the last straw finally breaks him and Jim runs away from home to a friend's house; they keep trying to drag Jim back into the home that crushed him. Soft, motherly women never will comprehend Real Men (TM), is the unsubtle message here. It takes some time, and being literally trapped in the belly of a whale (hands up, anyone surprised by how this story takes a turn into the religious and spiritual weeds at the earliest opportunity), for Jim to reflect and realize he wasn't entirely blameless for the rift in the relationship, at least when he was older and had a little more autonomy. Through flashbacks, the horrible pressures that Mitt's mercurial moods and overbearing personality subjected Jim to are revealed, the forces that shaped and twisted the boy into the angry, confused young man who plunges into Monastery Beach without a diving partner or much of a plan, save a driving need to seek Mitt's remains and, with them, a sense of closure that eludes him.
As mentioned earlier, the story itself is plodding, full of sensory details and technical diving terminology while turning almost everything into some sort of reflection or metaphor of Jim's inner confusion and directionless rage. It takes some time to actually get to the whale, though the horror of that incident, and the time spent trapped in the whale, almost become numbing at some point; even in a life-or-death situation, Jim just won't listen and often does the stupidest thing... though the ghost-voice of Mitt could also spit things out a little more clearly, given the dire circumstances. From there, things degenerate into lessons on spirituality, the nature of life and death and birth and rebirth, the meaning of the universe in a speck of dust, and so on and so forth, often repeated in various forms to make sure the reader Gets It and sees the Profound Meaning the author is driving at with the subtlety of a charging sperm whale. The climax drags out to excruciating lengths (seriously, if you have trigger issues about claustrophobia or bodily injury and mutilation, this is not the story for you), and the conclusion is in no hurry to conclude. It darned near lost another half-star by then. That said, there are moments of profundity and glimmers of beauty and wonder now and again. It's clear the author has a deep love for the ocean and diving and the wonders beneath the waves. It was just far too slow, too gory, and too steeped in heavy-handed spirituality for me to really enjoy it.

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