So maybe I’m a little bitter. A little traumatized. Even a little broken. I’ve been let down enough times by now that you’d think I’d stop getting my hopes up, but no. I can still get so swept up into a story that I feel a deep, sickening sense of betrayal when the author reveals towards the end that the whole thing was (sigh) a dream.
Or that the narrator was lying.
Or that the narrator was CrAzY.
Or that the whole thing was a novel being written by a novelist within the novel.
If I wasn’t so attached to letting you know I have the correct opinion almost all of the time, I would let end here and wait for you to angrily send me your lists of books that handle these conventions really well. But we’re all friends here. I know there are books that do this right, and you can send me your lists whether you’re angry or not! Please! Just don’t recommend Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I’ve read it and it’s not for me.
Anyway. I was recently burned by an experience where an utterly immersive plot turned out to be *twist!* only possible due to the narrator being CrAzY, and I found it infuriating.
That experience has made it difficult to trust, and narrative transportation depends on trust. Now I find myself suspicious of a book that seems too good to be true. Last week I listened to the audiobook version of Whalefall by Daniel Kraus. This is a very, very, very good book, as one would expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner. But I kept getting yanked to the surface by my fear that the protagonist — a diver who has been swallowed by a whale — was suffering from hallucinations due to nitrogen narcosis and the whole thing would turn out to have been literally just a dream.
I’m not going to spoil the ending, but I don’t say something is a very, very, very good book unless I’m convinced it will treat you as well as it treated me. I became interested after watching a trailer for the upcoming feature film, which I will not be seeing due to some very specific phobias I have about being trapped underwater. There were times while reading Whalefall that my chest got a little tight with anxiety due to said phobias, and the book also has a lot of body horror, so it’s not for everyone, but it’s for almost everyone. I am always impressed when a writer of fiction makes it clear they’ve done the research, and the nerd in me absolutely reveled in learning so much about dive culture, dive equipment, human biology, whale biology, whale social dynamics, Inupiat hunting culture and giant squid. Not to mention the phenomena of whalefalls themselves, wherein the corpses of these giant mammals go on to create entire ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean. Definitely worth an afternoon on Wikipedia
Whalefall is a thriller, but it can also read as an extended metaphor for grief and its power to swallow you whole. In the novel the protagonist is grieving his father, with whom he had a complicated relationship. My mom has been dead five years now, a sentence that feels inconceivable to write. The thing no one tells you about the loss of a parent is that your relationship with them can become deeper once they have passed on. The advice they gave, the sacrifices they made, these all become more resonant. Kraus seems to get that. After my mom passed I found a clipping of the poem “To Those I Love,” by Isla Paschal Richardson among her things. I think about its last line often: “Twas Heaven, here with you.” I try to think of Earth as Heaven. After all, this is where all the good stuff like whales and books and giant squid and pasta and the people I love live. Everything ends. Entropy is an immutable law. If life is a story, let it be a real one with drama and risk and loss and an ending, not just a dream.
PS – I am all in for stories in which it turns out one or more person was a ghost the entire time. Totally different. Send them all my way!
What I’m Doing: Still painting my house! Also hoping to get aboard a boat and try a recipe from this vintage cookbook, for research purposes. If you know someone with a boat that has a galley, please connect us!
What I’m Reading: Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin Stevenson. A super fun and funny murder mystery recommended by my dear friend Monica. The book also references Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction, which are generally spot on but which I’m loathe to point anyone towards because one of his rules is racist bullshit. Suffice to say Knox and I agree on the idea of an unreliable narrator usually being a lazy gimmick.
What I’m Writing: Just this, but I have some stuff coming out in The Journal soon, which I will link to. In the meantime, I’ve added my previous newsletters to my website so if you’re new and you want to read about deli meat or pelicans, you can find them here: lindastansberry.com/stories
And if you’re reading this but aren’t subscribed to my newsletter, here’s a form to sign up! I try to write once a week.