rachelmanija | Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus

Isn't that a great cover?

Daniel Kraus co-wrote The Shape of Water. This novel also blends fantastical elements with dramatic emotion. And water.

Jay, a seventeen-year-old with conflicted feelings about his diver father's recent death, goes scuba diving in the hope of finding his father's remains. Instead, he gets swallowed by a sperm whale. Jay has one hour to use what he has on him and what he finds in the whale's stomach to escape before his oxygen runs out. But while he's in the belly of the whale, things begin to get even stranger than one might expect given the circumstances. Jay has to grapple with his feelings about his dead asshole father - and possibly with his father's ghost - if he's going to get out alive.

A lot of people REALLY loved Whalefall and found it exremely moving. It 100% leans into its premise - all elements of its premise, not just the "swallowed by a whale" part. Someone on Goodreads who didn't like it called it "daddy issues in a whale," which is basically true, but this is undoubtedly the best "daddy issues in a whale" book you'll ever read. The inside-a-whale elements are a pleasing mix of well-researched and totally batshit. The layering of whale mythology and death/birth motifs is very well -done, as are Jay's changing feelings toward the whale itself.

I appreciated the technical accomplishments of the book more than I felt emotionally moved by it. American fiction is so dominated by sons with daddy issues that a book based on that has to really make both father and son come to life for me to get into it. Jay's dad was such an asshole that I didn't root for Jay to realize the old man had his good points. (Other readers felt that daddy was fine and Jay was a selfish jerk to him.) But for a lot of readers, the father-son relationship was extremely powerful and moving.

My other issue with the book was the prose. Especially early on, it's overwritten. A lot of his turns of phrase are good, but not all of them, and the density often feels forced. It sometimes felt like Kraus had gone over every sentence with the goal of replacing at least one straightforward word or phrase with some unusual image or metaphor.

For instance, His car sheds rust scabs as he grovels it along the cinnamon shoulder of Highway 1. I like the rust scabs and cinnamon road. But "grovels" is both one unusual turn of phrase too many, and one which stopped me dead to figure out why Jay was suddenly groveling when he'd been confident and determined the instant before. By the time I figured out that Kraus meant that the car was physically crawling in the sense of riding low rather than the emotional sense of the term, I had lost the momentum of the story.

Content notes: Gross whale anatomy. Gross descriptions of cancer. Suicide. Jay doesn't kill the whale or attempt to significantly harm it, but there is some whale harm and death in the book.

I did not care for the part where his asshole dad, as either a ghost or Jay's hallucination, says that everything he did to Jay was worth it because the knowledge he imparted will help Jay stay alive. I don't mind that he says it, but I don't like that it's implied that the old man makes a good point. Abusers love to say that they needed to abuse their kids because it's actually good for them and some time later the kids will thank them for it, so that scene had some unfortunate implications.

The whale conveniently dies near the surface of a combination of old age, orca attack, and possible suicide, allowing Jay to damage its body without either the whale diving to the ocean floor or Jay being responsible for killing it.

My favorite part of the book was when Jay starts identifying the whale with his father and begins rooting for the whale to survive. I also like the balls-to-the-wall earnest absurdity of when the constant refrain of "don't break his [your father's] heart" becomes "go on, break his heart," meaning that Jay needs to literally tear through the whale's literal heart to survive!

I also enjoyed his use of a jellyfish as a lantern. And his MacGyver-worthy use of random objects and whale knowledge to create an explosion within the now-dead whale!

By the end of the book, Jay has two broken eardrums, broken teeth, broken ribs, two shattered legs, a missing hand, barotrauma, a severe wound to his neck, major blood loss, chemical burns, and thermal burns! And that's only the injuries we know for sure that he has - all his bones including his skull being pressure-squished to the point that his eyes bugged out and he couldn't expand his lungs makes me suspect other injuries as well.

I am slightly dubious at the statement by rescuers that he will survive, and would love to see doctors reacting to him being brought in. "He was rescued by people on a whale-watching boat who claim that they saw a sperm whale explode and they pulled the kid out of its heart. Yeah, you heard me."

Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus

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