Under the Wave at Waimea by Paul Theroux

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 13, 2021

Paul Theroux’s new novel takes as its plot the life of a surfer. For a time, his life seems too superficial to sustain a plot. Joe Sharkey is a high school dropout, a stoner who — apart from a gig in his youth as a lifeguard — has never had a job. Millionaires envy Sharkey, “they wanted his friendship, they praised his life, the life he had made out of accident and desperation and dumb luck, his whole existence a form of escape, fleeing to the water to be himself and protecting himself on land by telling lies about his life.” Sharkey seems mindlessly happy, untroubled because he is disconnected from the ordinary concerns that plague the rest of us. How could such an empty life be interesting? In the literary hands of Theroux, anything is possible.

As the novel begins, Sharkey is 62, still surfing, but battling aches and doubts. He is a legend whose fame and skills are both diminishing. Theroux is 80 and, at least as a writer, has not diminished a bit. The story is about aging, but it is also about atonement and the search for meaning in life. In the novel’s last third, Sharkey’s mindless happiness has become mindful regret. There is more to life than happiness, Theroux reminds us. Under the Wave at Waimea suggest that true happiness can’t be attained without true understanding. “If I don’t know myself,” Sharkey asks near the novel’s end, “how can you possibly know me?”

The story is told in three parts. The first and last take place in Sharkey’s present. The middle of the novel constructs the details of Sharkey’s life. As an Army brat whose father wants him to go to West Point and serve in Vietnam, Sharkey gets kicked out of a private school for smoking weed and refusing to rat out his source. He’s ostracized as a haole in a public school but escapes the bullies by isolating himself on a surfboard. Over the years, building a life from sun and sea, Sharkey wins competitions, gets endorsement contracts, has sex with beach bunnies, and travels the world, never once reading a book or thinking that his life is missing anything worthwhile. He forms a superficial attachment to Hunter Thompson but never troubles himself to read the autographed copy of a book that Thompson gives him. Eventually Sharkey meets Olive, a kind and patient woman who loves Sharkey despite his faults, including his self-absorption, his unthinking failure to make her a meaningful part of his life.

The novel’s first part leads to its defining moment as a buzzed Sharkey, driving in the rain on a dark night while telling Olive a story from his past, hits and kills a homeless bicycle rider. Sharkey tells the cop who shows up that he hadn’t been drinking. The cop, recognizing Sharkey as a legendary surfer, doesn’t seem interested in investigating the death of a homeless man. When Olive presses Sharkey to discuss his role in the death, Sharkey dismisses it as inconsequential, but something about the death changes Sharkey, reduces him, makes him feel his age and steals his motivation to surf. Sharkey’s near drowning and Olive’s miscarriage send the message that a dark cloud is hanging over a life that Sharkey has always regarded as sunny and carefree.

The last part of the novel picks up the story of an unfocused Sharkey who is smoking too much weed and surfing too little, still refusing to acknowledge the importance of killing another human being. Tired of listening to Sharkey respond to her confrontation with “he was a homeless drunk,” Olive embarks on a quest to reconstruct the man’s life. He might have been a homeless drunk when he died, but she learns that he was much more than that during his life. Even in hard times, he was a trusted friend, an inspiration to those who knew him.

The quest takes Olive (with Sharkey in tow) to Arkansas and back to Hawaii, where they meet men who have fallen on hard times, including some Sharkey knew in his childhood. Olive forces Sharkey to add up his life, the life in which he feels so much pride, and stack it up against the remarkable highs and tragic lows of the life made by the man Sharkey dismisses as a “drunk homeless guy.”

Theroux is among the best painters of word pictures. From faces to fingernails, from rocky shores to moonglow on a distant headland that looks like “an outstretched paw,” Theroux’s descriptive prose invites visualization. Hawaii, of course, is a remarkable place to visualize. Theroux captures not just the beaches and waves but the beauty of a culture that values integrity and truth while practicing the ugliness of racial judgment. Sharkey believes that Hawaii’s beauty is pure, that everything ugly about the islands — drugs, shoes, plastic bags, crime scene tape — comes from the mainland. Sharkey only belatedly wonders whether he is part of the ugliness that has contaminated the native purity.

There is a lot to unpack in Under the Waves at Waimea. To some degree, the novel is about white privilege. Sharkey is a haole, scorned by many native Hawaiians until he proves himself as a surfer, but he gets endorsement contracts that better, native surfers never seek. Late in the novel Sharkey is accused of having “snobbed” his native peers. For the most part, the novel is about self-discovery, about the importance of kindness and the need to put aside self-satisfaction to live a truly happy life. But it is also about setting aside judgment, about recognizing the complexity and value of others, about not basing opinions on one sliver of a multi-faceted life. There is some redundancy in Theroux’s effort to make his points — there isn’t much subtlety here — but the points he makes are important and the story is both moving and memorable.

RECOMMENDED

Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free by Judge Jed S. Rakoff

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 16, 2021

Jed Rakoff covers much more than the two topics featured in the title of this brief overview of the problems that plague the judicial system. His first chapter discusses America’s ridiculous overreliance on incarceration as a solution to crime. He acknowledges a correlation between a declining crime rate and a swelling prison population while reminding the reader that correlations do not prove causation. When I was taking criminology decades ago, I remember a professor arguing that crime rates correlate with age because “crime is a young man’s game.” Crime rates may well have fallen because baby boomers got older, not because more of them were locked up. In any event, Judge Rakoff explains that mass incarceration has social costs that must be weighed against the potential benefits of a declining crime rate. Another punishment chapter explores the perils of using the death penalty in a system that is plagued by mistake and racism.

A few chapters explore the reasons that the judicial system so often imprisons the innocent. Mistaken eyewitness identifications and junk science masquerading as forensic science are two of them. Both subjects have been explored at length in other books and journal articles, but Judge Rakoff’s book is a good introduction for readers who want a quick summary. I particularly liked the judge’s advocacy of the suggestion that forensic science should be conducted by independent organizations, not by crime lab technicians who regard themselves as working for the police. Science should be neutral, but forensic scientists who see themselves as “helping” the police have a proven tendency to slant their conclusions to support an arrest.

The innocent plead guilty because they fear they will get a longer sentence if they risk a trial and lose. The risk is appreciable, given the evidentiary problems and biases that impair the system’s fairness. Judge Rakoff calls for greater judicial involvement in plea bargaining (although perhaps not involving the judge who presides in the case) to assure that the evidence actually supports guilt and that the defendant is actually guilty.

A chapter on brain science is again a useful introduction to the uneasy relationship between a judicial system that holds people accountable for intentional misconduct and a branch of science that can’t tell us what the word “intends” even means. Again, excellent books and articles have been written on the subject that explore the topic in greater detail.

Some of the middle chapters tackle problems in more depth. I particularly liked Judge Rakoff’s nuanced explanation of the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute corporate leaders for financial fraud, opting instead to “change corporate culture” by entering into deferred prosecution agreements with corporations that the companies view as a cost of doing (fraudulent) business.

Other detailed chapters bemoan the federal courts’ loss of authority to correct unfairness in the state criminal justice systems, largely through a whittling down of habeas corpus review. In that context, Judge Rakoff explores the impact of the “war on terror” on the loss of federal authority to assure that states respect the federal Constitution. Congress and conservative justices on the Supreme Court have been complicit in assuring that profoundly unfair decisions in state court, as well as unjust detentions at Guantanamo, are largely ignored by the federal judiciary.

Political observers have long documented the rise of executive branch power at the expense of congressional oversight. Judge Rakoff suggests that judicial oversight of the executive branch in our system of checks and balances has been nearly abandoned by the Supreme Court (particularly, I would add, when the president is a Republican). The judge offers a history lesson that stretches from the Supreme Court’s first Chief Justice to explain how the Court’s view of its institutional power is rooted in a politically expedient deference to a branch that holds greater power (lacking command of a military, the judiciary depends on the executive to enforce its decisions). That deference is particularly strong when the executive branch claims authority to trample rights in the interest of national security.

Along the same lines, Judge Rakoff examines judicial doctrines, including narrow interpretations of standing (the rules that determine who has suffered an injury that entitles a litigant to sue) and the political question doctrine (the notion that some issues, like gerrymandering, are better decided by legislatures than courts), that shield governmental misconduct from review. Another chapter discusses the difficulty of obtaining access to the civil judicial system for a variety of reasons (such as the prevalence of arbitration agreements and the cost of hiring a lawyer — a cost that banks foreclosing a mortgage can bear more easily than homeowners facing foreclosure). He returns the discussion to the criminal justice system by emphasizing an earlier point about the ways in which defendants and their lawyers have grown increasingly powerless, as sentencing guidelines and other procedures divert decision-making authority from judges to prosecutors, who often decide (regardless of the defense lawyr's skill) not just the crime of conviction but the sentence that will be imposed. That regime has resulted in ever-increasing sentences.

All of this will be familiar to people who follow law and the judiciary. The system really is broken. It has been for years. For those who aren't familiar with the problems that Judge Rakoff spotlights, the book serves as an excellent introduction to a variety of problems that need to be addressed. Judge Rakoff suggests possible improvements at various places in the text, but meaningful improvement will only come if America insists upon Supreme Court justices who value justice more than their interest in maintaining a system that is largely designed to keep power in the hands of the powerful.

RECOMMENDED

Robot Artists and Black Swans by Bruce Sterling

Published in an illustrated edition by Tachyon Publications on April 27, 2021

Seven Bruce Sterling stories are collected in Robot Artists and Black Swans. I liked a couple of them, was amused by a couple more, and didn’t understand the rest. That’s consistent with my experience of Sterling’s work.

A forward explains that these stories of “fantascienza” are written by Bruno Argento, a Turinese writer whose pen name is Bruce Sterling. The stories are linked by their connection to Italy. Neal Stephenson contributes an introduction that extols the virtues of cyberpunk, which some of these stories might be.

The robot artist in the collection’s title is a wheelchair that once belonged to a Japanese artist. Now it roams around the world, making art in various ways, assembling “mosaics of pebbles” or weaving “great lattices from twigs and dry grass, creations like fantastic bird’s nests.”  The wheelchair is followed by Ghost Club intellectuals who document its creations for the appreciation of the Beau Monde. Its current follower is Wolfgang, who defends it from those who view science as being at war with the humanities. Wolfgang is convinced that the wheelchair is producing important art, but he is struggling to find a “clear line of critical attack” to explain to the world exactly why the wheelchair must be valued. He likens the robot artist to beautiful cities like Verona, “authentic entities, growing from landscapes,” loved for their beauty despite (like the robot artist) not being alive or intelligent. A scientist who accuses Wolfgang of belonging to a cult wonders why he would “walk the Earth making up weird artsy bullshit about a cheap parlor trick,” prompting the retort that science is “notoriously useless for seeking metaphysical truth or establishing ethical values.” Both arguments have merit. The story dramatizes culture wars, asks whether there might be artistry in computer code, ponders the role of art, science, and critics in life, considers whether there is a “third state of being,” and asks whether art can be good if we don’t understand it. Add a post-anthropologist who considers herself to be superhuman and you’ve got quite a story. While it sometimes drags in its exploration of plot tangents, “Robot in Roses” showcases Sterling’s far-ranging imagination.

The other story that grabbed me is “Esoteric City,” a tongue-in-cheek tale of the supernatural. A necromancer named Achille Occhietti conjures a demon mummy as his guide to the dark spirits. The mummy leads Occhietti down a spiral staircase to Hell, a “keenly tourist-friendly” path with glossy signs “that urged the abandonment of all hope in fourteen official European Union languages.” Dead Italian journalists and literary critics make the most noise in Hell. Occhietti is fated to return to the world of the living to meet Satan, who has rejected “Cold War-style metaphysics.” To make a deal for souls now, he offers global solutions to climate change — at a price.

“Black Swan” is about a tech journalist whose source, Massimo Montaldo, hacks “chip secrets” to manipulate the industry. Montaldo wants to release his hack of a revolutionary memristor to an Italian company so that Italy will no longer be a second-rate tech power. When the journalist insists on learning the source of the technology, Montaldo explains his knowledge of 64 Italys that exist in 64 universes. In one of them, the tech writer made more of himself than he did in the universe he occupies.

“Kill the Moon” is a cute story about Italians who followed American astronauts to the moon. Instead of sending scientists, Italy sent a billionaire and “his busty actress girlfriend.” Because Italy.

Three other stories did nothing for me at all, so I can only recommend half the collection.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Published by Grove Press on March 2, 2021

The Committed is a sequel to the The Sympathizer, a novel Tzer Island highly recommends. The narrator of The Sympathizer is half French, half Vietnamese. He was a communist spy in South Vietnam who fled to the United States during the fall of Saigon. He survived a Vietnamese re-education camp after returning to Vietnam, where he wrote the confession that is The Sympathizer. He ends that novel as a refugee.

In The Committed, the narrator — still nameless but known to most as “the crazy bastard,” although he reinvented himself as Vo Danh and later as Joseph Nguyen, joining his baptismal name with the most common surname in Vietnam — has made his way to France with his friend and blood brother Bon, a committed anti-communist who does not know that the narrator betrayed their pact by becoming a communist. When Bon and a third blood brother, Man, reunite with the protagonist at the novel’s end, their discussion of Vietnamese communism and American or French imperialism makes clear that ideology makes little most difference to people who are dodging bullets and napalm, as important as it might be the ideologically committed.

The reeducation camp taught the narrator that “dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.” Conflicting ideology is one of the many forces that drive The Committed. The narrator tells us that his greatest talent is the ability to see every issue from both sides, to appreciate the contradictions that are fundamental to ideology and to life itself. He accepts that Bon can be both “a devout Catholic and a calm killer,” a slayer of communists. The title suggests this ambiguity: a crime can be committed and confessed; you can be committed to a cause or to an asylum. The narrator is a communist who lives as a capitalist, selling hash and later a harder drug he calls “the remedy.” He speaks fluent French and, although he is not accepted as a Frenchman, he is admired by the French for his fluency, proof that their imperialism in Vietnam paid dividends. Imperialism is a political theme that surfaces again and again as the narrator contemplates the fate of Vietnam and its people.

The second novel, like the first, is written as a confession. The narrator has a lot to confess, despite being “a nobody who believes in nothing.” The Committed, however, begins with the news that the narrator is dead, killed by Bon, the inevitable outcome of the protagonist’s ideological betrayal of his blood brother.  

Given the protagonist’s ability to write a second confession after his death, it is no surprise that the death is metaphysical. Late in the novel, the narrator describes himself as “a dead man whom others seem to think is still alive.” Perhaps he describes himself as dead because he believes he should be dead, that his life has no worth. The novel’s penultimate chapter arrives at a climactic moment that explains why the narrator might have concluded that he is dead at Bon’s hands.

While the plot ultimately surrounds the narrator’s fragile relationship with his blood brothers, it begins by describing his relationship with his aunt, a fellow communist who sponsored the narrator’s departure from a refugee camp. The aunt is a devoted communist and thus despised by Bon, but when the narrator begins to sell hash, she is enough of a capitalist to demand a cut of the profits.

His drug dealing serves another refugee, a Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese ancestry who is known as the Boss. The Boss was a black-market profiteer in Vietnam who reestablished himself as a shady businessman in France. The Boss operates from an Asian restaurant that is a front for his criminal enterprise. He uses the restaurant employees, Le Cao Boi and the Seven Dwarves, to expand his business from the Asian ghetto to the whiteness of central Paris. The narrator uses the Boss to advance the theme that “Asian” is a complex mixture of ethnicity and culture, despite the French and American tendency to see Asians as a single blended product. The narrator's relationship with the Boss, like many of his relationships, will end violently.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is among the greatest prose stylists in modern American literature. He rivals Nabokov in his mastery of English as a second language. His juxtaposition of highbrow language with slang creates a lyricism that is all his own. The Committed continues the acute observation of detail that made The Sympathizer so memorable. Here is his description of the Boss: “Now he was clad in loafers, creased slacks, and a polo shirt, the casual wear of the urban, Western branch of homo sapiens, his trimmed hair parted so neatly one could have laid a pencil in the groove.”

The story occasionally devolves into rants and lectures about the narrator’s grievances. The grievances are justified, but there is a certain degree of redundancy in their telling. The plot breaks down from time to time when grievances are aired, but this isn’t the kind of book that depends on a conventional plot for its value. It is instead a book worth reading for its truth.

The narrator’s ultimate realization after exposure to a lifetime of violence, after considering that “history’s wheels are oiled by blood,” is that violence makes us “feel like men but behave like devils” while nonviolence “instead of making us mirror images of our colonizers . . . could break the mirror altogether and liberate us from the need to see ourselves in the eyes of our oppressors.” The novel’s ending might be seen as ironic in light of that belated epiphany.

The boldness of Nguyen’s prose and the themes of his narrative are less startling after reading The Sympathizer. Had I read The Committed without reading The Sympathizer, I would have again been struck by its freshness. Viewing the novel as a continuation of The Sympathizer seems like the fairest way to rate it, but since the novel stands alone, and since I did read it as a sequel, I think it deserves a rave Recommended but doesn’t quite earn the Highly Recommended I gave to The Sympathizer.

RECOMMENDED

The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson

Published in Iceland in 2018; published in translation by Minotaur Books on May 4, 2021

Multiple mysteries intersect in The Girl Who Died. What happened to the little girl who seems to be haunting the house where Una is staying? What caused the death of another little girl decades later? Why is Thór, despite his obvious attraction to Una, resisting any kind of relationship with her? Why is a woman serving time in prison for a murder she didn’t commit? Why is an entire village lying about seeing a man who appeared in the village after he vanished from Reykjavik? Why does nearly everyone in the village want Una to leave?

Una begins the novel in Reykjavik, where circumstances have conspired to make her unhappy. A friend shows her a notice for a teaching position in the remote fishing village of Skálar. Una applies and, by virtue of being the only applicant, is hired. The village only has two children, two girls who are not far apart in age. As part of Una’s compensation, she’s given an attic room in the house where one of the girls lives with her mother.

Arriving at the village after a long day of driving, Una finds the place where she’ll be staying. (It’s the first house she sees, but there aren’t many houses in a village that only has about ten residents.) As she approaches the front door, Una sees a child dressed in white peering at her from the window. She assumes the child is Edda, the child who lives in the house, but when she introduces herself, Edda denies having seen her from the window. We later learn that the villagers regard the house as haunted by the spirit of a girl who died decades earlier under circumstances that nobody wants to share with Una.

Much of the story develops Una’s sense of being an outsider. Apart from Edda’s mother, who insisted that the two village children needed a proper education, nobody wants Una to stay. Una reacts to her ostracization by drinking a bottle of wine most nights, which the village gossips — meaning nearly every villager — soon notice. One of the few villagers who is friendly to Una is Thór, a single man who lives in a platonic relationship with a woman. He makes Una feel even more lonely by politely resisting her advances for reasons he refuses to disclose.

Against that background, a plot gains ground when a man appears in the village. He tells Una he is looking for a particular residence where he heard he might be able to rent a room for the night. Days later, after Una learns that someone resembling the man has been reported missing from Reykjavik, she wonders why everyone in the village is denying knowledge of the man’s existence.

Compounding the mystery are chapters told from the perspective of a young woman in prison. She and two other people were convicted of murdering two victims whose bodies were never found. She confessed to the crime after the police convinced her of her guilt, but she has no memory of committing the murder. The book is nearing its end before we learn how the apparently innocent woman fits in with the other plot elements.

The notice for the teaching job describes the village’s location as “the end of the world.” It seems that way to Una. Her sense of isolation, loneliness, and self-doubt is amplified by the bleakness of the landscape in which Ragnar Jónasson set the story. The atmosphere gives the novel an eerie feeling, while Una’s reaction to living at the end of the world makes her a sympathetic character.

The Girl Who Died blends a multifaceted mystery plot with elements of the supernatural. I’m not a big fan of the supernatural, but whether the ghost is real or the byproduct of Una’s anxiety, perhaps combined with her alcohol consumption, is ambiguous for much of the novel. The sense of living in a haunted place does add to Una’s distress, so the ghost, real or imagined, contributes to the story. A reader may need to suspend belief in the supernatural to appreciate the last brief chapters.

The story raises intriguing moral issues that I can’t discuss without revealing the novel’s secrets. Doing the right thing for one person will harm another person, creating the kind of a moral dilemma that makes the reader think about how the reader might respond to the same situation. Whether Una makes the right choice is certainly open to debate, but I regard that as a good thing. A surprising conclusion resolves the story elements in way that is true to the novel’s macabre tone. I’ve only read a few of Jónasson’s novels, but I’ve read enough to know that he’s a skilled mystery writer.

RECOMMENDED