A below-average novel, more notable for its various defects than for its story and characters.
This novel feels off, it has a wide range of structural and technical flaws, it is poorly unified, the characters are not psychologically believable, and (as we'll see in the next paragraph) the author's own voice lacks credibility as he speaks on the book's core subject. The story does not feel organic, in fact it doesn't really feel much like a story at all.
I'll start with the book's most blatant flaw: if you want to write a novel about a surfer, you simply cannot know next to nothing about surfing. The author makes basic errors, making it painfully obvious that neither he nor his editors has ever surfed.
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That is by far this novel's worst problem, but there are plenty more. The author has a habit of telling rather than showing. The main characters go through deeply unrealistic personality changes. Even the relationship between the book's two central characters is implausible, in large part because the author has structured the female love interest as a highly perceptive Mary Sue-type figure who would never endure a relationship with the author's clinically narcissistic main character.
And there's more! The plot is ill-drawn and contains continuity errors. Poorly-integrated secondary and tertiary characters wander in and out of the pages. And, finally, a good third of the book involves the real-life Hunter S. Thompson stumbling around, banging into the walls of the story without any coherency with the plot. I can understand how the author, a longtime friend of Thompson with obvious affection for the man, might have wanted to write a paean to him. But it should be its own story rather than gavaged into this one.
Unless you enjoy reading a book to study its defects, you can safely skip this novel.
Two (much more realistic) surfing-related books to consider instead:
[Readers, what follows are my notes and quotes from the text: I include them to help me better remember what I read. I recommend skipping them entirely this time.]
Notes:
Part I: Under the Wave at Waimea
Chapter 1: The Island of No Bad Days
3ff We meet Joe Sharkey, all sorts of tattoos all over his body, 62, he has a young lover, Olive, 24 years younger. Also a very soft-core sex scene on the third page of the novel, forced into a metaphor for riding a wave.
6 A couple of highly suspect examples here (on this page alone!) of the author's prose. The first sounds suspiciously purple, the second is a unreadable run-on:
"Now the sun was a hot blade at the window, and a dewy blue stillness of thick dampened petals sweetened the morning."
"A tall girl nearby with sun-scorched hair and a stipple of tattoos across the tops of her breasts and a swimmer's pale pickled-looking fingers looked up, smiled at Sharkey, broke away from her shouting group, and approached him."
7ff The main character, at a party, explains to a bunch of young people what the "old days" were like at Waimea Bay and Pipeline: Sharkey talks about how he knew Eddie Aikau and his brother Clyde, but hardly anyone there even knew who he was. He's growing old, his knees ache, he needs to rest after just a couple of surfing sessions in a day. But yet he's also content, happy to live on the island.
12ff Backstory on Sharkey's girlfriend Olive, who came to Hawaii for vacation from London, saw a bumper sticker that said "No Bad Days" in Haleiwa, dreamed of coming back, and within a month quit her job and actually did come back, finding work as a nurse at Rocky Point.
Chapter 2: Epic Surf
15ff Sharkey goes out surfing at Rubber Duckies. He finds a couple of foreigners out on the break who have no idea who he is, and who don't know the break at all: eventually they end up foundering on the rocks, one of the guys damaged his fin and is injured. Sharkey now has the break to himself. He catches his waves, goes in, takes a nap on the beach, and as he wakes up two young surfers walk by who also don't know who he is. Sharkey then goes for a swim, then decides to walk over to Waimea to surf some more. [The main character seems to have mixed feelings about this: he loves the anonymity, at least he tells himself/the reader this, but be also comes across as weirdly fixated on whether people know him or not. This is a strange quality to bring out of your main character so early on in the story, we'll see what the author can do with this.]
19 Two appalling errors here where the author reveals that he doesn't understand surfing: 1) on a longboard, you can't duck dive under a big wave, and 2) surfers don't "ride" their boards while waiting in the lineup.
19ff Sharkey catches his waves and then goes in, buying raw tuna from a roadside vendor on the way home. Olive arrives and they have dinner. He lays awake in bed musing on what a great day it was: starting with waking up from a good dream, making love, feeding his geese, surfing, seeing whales, seeing a turtle, catching a monster wave at Waimea, etc. "A perfect day."
Chapter 3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
23 Sharkey, at a restaurant, decries the litter on the beach while he stares at a waitress's ass. Olive arrives. He becomes sullen, saying humans are "the problem" and via their conversation the reader gets a multi-page lecture about environmental issues. Sharkey then talks about how he knew Hunter S. Thompson. A friend at the restaurant comes over to talk and gives him a bag of weed. Olive tells Sharkey she likes him drunk.
Chapter 4: Drunk on the Road
32ff Sharkey drives home, drunk, in a heavy rainstorm. He's telling a story about his friend Moe sending weed to his house in California, but at the same time he can't see through the rain and the glare as he's driving. Suddenly, mid-sentence, he hits something with his car, it turns out to be a guy riding a bike on the wrong side of the road, killing the man. He goes to the police station to make a statement and frames it as if it was the guy's fault; the cops all know him and talk to him about surfing; nobody seems to care about the victim--especially the police, who keep acting like fanboys around Sharkey; this deeply irritates Olive. Later at home Sharkey says "I ran into a drunk homeless guy." It bothers Olive again: she expects him to own the responsibility and say "I killed a man."
Chapter 5: The Search for the Hundred-Foot Wave
40ff Something ugly and ominous has started creeping over Sharkey's life. Olive is appalled at how he dishonestly narrates the accident. We learn some backstory on Sharkey's father's death, the money the family inherited, on his complicated relationship with his mother, his early days surfing and the start of his pro surfing career. He has a sort of guilt over the fact that he wished his mother dead. He presents himself as happy, but the impression he presents of his life is "misleading, and incomplete, and much of it false." [This chapter is pure expository: the author might consider "showing" this in the narrative rather than just "telling" it to the reader.]
Chapter 6: Portents
46ff Olive can't comprehend how Sharkey can make the accident all about him. To Sharkey, after this accident "his life seemed to stall, to falter and then to skip backward." He feels like if he had paid attention, had he been heeding the warnings "his life would have been undisturbed." He thinks through various portents: the discussion with the young surfer at the party earlier in the book, he thinks back to another portent where he had a strange encounter with a woman he gave a ride to: he had seen her carrying a tennis racket and mistakenly concluded that it would be okay to give her a ride, but it turned out the woman was drugged out and wasted, and when he asked her to get out of the car she spat at him. Then some unknown dogs came by his house and likely killed his male goose. And then he's accosted by a woman in the grocery store who claims he never answered her letter. All of this stuff happened right before he had the accident and he was troubled that he couldn't read the meaning of these things at the time. [Once again the author tells this stuff rather than shows it: he contrives most of these portents here in expository form as if they happened in the backstory, rather than somehow either "showing" them organically in the story, or "showing" them in flashback form. It makes the story drag.]
Chapter 7: Picking Up the Pieces
53ff We hear the main character upset that he's not appreciated, not recognized, that he's just an old geezer with leathery skin and flip-flops. [It's actually weird to the reader that this character expects people to give him credit and adulation for things he does alone: he wants all the young surfers to know that he surfs alone at night after they've all gone in, he wants to be appreciated for these things publicly even though they couldn't be seen any by anybody in the first place. Strange on a few levels. The reader here also is clueing in on Sharkey's narcissism here too, the character will become subtly but increasingly repulsive on certain levels as the novel progresses]. Sharkey has an exchange with the insurance claims guys, and then the body shop guy wants to buy his damaged car, until he sees blood ("koko") on it. Sharkey buys a new car, enjoying the attention from salesmen who actually knew about him. Then he has a sudden bout of severe back spasms, laying him up in bed.
Chapter 8: Intrusions
61ff Sharkey resolves to go surfing to help recover from his back spasms and has an imaginary debate with Olive over it--even though she's at work and not even there. [Is this "dialog" for the reader's benefit? I don't see the narrative purpose of this scene at all.] He catches his reflection in the car mirror and is appalled by it; then, while he's gazing at himself like Narcissus, he clips a clay planter in his driveway and scratches up his front fender. A man sees his fender and mocks it, says it's kapakahi, screwed up. Sharkey goes surfing and catches his board on coral on his paddle out; later as he wipes out attempting to catch a wave he realizes he broke all of his fins. [Once again the author exposes his lack of surfing knowledge in how he describes this... if he'd broken off all three fins of a longboard, he'd know long before he tried to catch a wave]. As he comes out of the water he sees the man who mocked his car pedaling away; Sharkey then finds his window smashed and his "expensive" sunglasses stolen.
66ff The bad luck continues as Sharkey starts having accidents, minor falls, he drops eggs, he has bad interactions with other people.
Chapter 9: Repetitions
69ff Sharkey starts telling the same stories and they're all about himself; Olive tells him "Queen Anne's dead" as she's already getting tired of the stories and starts finishing them for him [and what's disturbing here is that they've only been together like six or seven weeks at this point according to the storyline and he's already telling the same stories over and over again]. Olive thinks to herself that Sharkey is a blatant parody of himself. [The Olive character is starting to come across as a sort of Mary Sue: a perfected character, capable of psychoanalyzing seeing deeply into people, etc. But if this were really true about her character she would have recognized Sharkey's clinical narcissism and left him long ago. Also the change here in their conversational patter is too radical, suddenly in this chapter she starts inserting details into his story that she'd only know if she'd heard them multiple times, but they haven't been together that long yet. This is a new conversational pattern that happens between the two characters a little too suddenly to be plausible.]
72 Even Sharkey now wakes up to the idea that he's retelling stories, as if Olive is listening to "an old man blab about the past." He's mortified. [Again, narcissism: he mostly worries about how he seems and how he comes across. Once again, imagine being with somebody for just weeks and already knowing all their stories...]
73-4 [A very odd continuity error here as the author, in own his narratorial voice, repeats details about Hunter S. Thompson again, restating things the reader already has heard back when Sharkey told this to Olive in a restaurant in Chapter 3 (compare to p 28).]
76 Olive has him get an MRI, she's worried about all the repeating; it's negative. On their way home he starts telling her another story she'd heard before.
Chapter 10: Hapai
78ff Olive continues to be confused by Sharkey's repeated stories and his delusional behavior, even though he appears to be functioning day-to-day more or less normally. His libido has vanished. She decides to leave him, and she begins the process in sort of a passive manner by switching to night shifts and living in the hospital nursing quarters. She learns she's pregnant.
Chapter 11: Leftovers
84ff Olive has been away for a week, but Sharkey acts like she hasn't been gone at all as he tells her about his day surfing. She moves back in with him. She needs to get his attention somehow to tell him the news that she's pregnant. They have a picnic on the beach, she tells him, and while he is "stoked" about it, he still somehow manages to make it about him all over again. "It makes me feel young" he says. Once again he doesn't remember that she had been away for a full week. She thinks about how his life had been stalled after the accident, but that her pregnancy news might be pulling him out of it.
92ff He persuades her to go bodyboarding [the author talks about wearing a swimmer's fin on just one leg, I don't know anything about this style of bodyboarding but maybe it's a North Shore thing?]. He tries to show her the ropes but she struggles, and then she feels what she thinks is an awful cramp. She screams to him for help, he comes to her and tows her back in, and she's realizes that she's bleeding into the water.
Chapter 12: Under the Wave at Waimea
94ff Olive has had a miscarriage, she's very upset by it. Sharkey asks "Is there a problem?" and "did not seem to remember now that she'd been pregnant." She is furious with him for persuading her to go out so far in the water, she's borderline repulsed by the fact that he's weakening, older, that his rescue was "clumsy," that he was diminished and that he was dependent on her. [There's nothing grosser to a woman than a weak and dependent man.] She has it out with him: "Nothing has gone right since the day of the accident." He yawned as he waited for her to finish. "Introspection wearied him." She almost gets him to talk about the accident, he remains in a sort of childish denial of it. He suggests talking about it tomorrow, but the next day he leaps out of bed and takes off to go surfing.
102ff Olive packs up most of her things, leaves some of her stuff on the lanai for later, then heads to work. She has a discussion with a doctor at work about examples of trauma-induced "psychogenic death" or "give-up-itis." When she returns to collect her things there is a rescue patrol truck there. Sharkey has had a huge wipe out: he looks like death on the sofa. Sharkey "began to cry, like a small boy in a strange land."
Part II: The History of a Hero
Chapter 1: Haole--The Scar
107ff Now the reader gets a lengthy backstory on Sharkey's childhood, his dad, his life at different military bases, his arrival to Hawaii as a haole boy. On his fear of dogs and his lack of fear in the ocean. On the dog attack in Hawaii that left his face scarred. The family received a cash settlement because of the attack and then moved to a nicer home off the base. Sharkey is entered in the Punahou School.
Chapter 2: Special Forces
115ff Snippets here of Sharkey's childhood: impressions of his father and his conversations, advice and declarations; his goals for Sharkey as he grew up; Sharkey finds a group of schoolmates who he smokes weed with as he couldn't really fit in with any other groups at Punahou; he finds the the school to be snobby, he felt it was worse than bullying, a form of "poisonous lying." He didn't want anyone to get to know him. One of the stoners at the school, Harry Ho, taught him some things about surfing and introduced them to some of the older surfers at Waikiki, The Beach Boys. He gets credibility among the surfing locals and finds a sort of ohana among them. He learns that his father was wrong about being suspicious of friendship, as thanks to his friendship of one of the kids at school he met and made friends with an entire family of surfing people.
Chapter 3: The Mark of the Beast
123ff Sharkey is caught smoking weed at school, and he's expelled after he refuses to snitch on his friends. He then enters a public school and is bullied by the other students because he's a haole. There's a bullying scene here where Sharkey more or less stands up to Wilfred, one of the key bullies in the school, and when Wilfred asks him how he got the scar on his face, Sharkey answers "Mark of the beast."
129 Another surfing error here: The author seems to think that there are barrels on the south shore--there occasionally are, but it's only in the summer and very infrequent--I think the author might be confusing the North and the South shores and the types of surfing you typically can do in these places. Note that the main character is surfing after school: this is not the time of year when you'd typically get to surf a barrel on the South shore.
130ff Another undersized boy, Blaine, gets the worst of it from the local boys at the school, Sharkey's scar seems to make them wary around him. Indirectly we learn that Blaine must have gotten beaten up and revealed that Sharkey was both bitten by a dog and also afraid of dogs, so then we see Wilfred the bully chasing after Sharkey with a dog straining on a leash. Sharkey runs down to Ala Moana, gets his surfboard and jumps into the ocean to escape them.
Chapter 4: Father Figures
135ff This is a section about Uncle Sunshine one of the older surfers, who persuades Sharkey to stop smoking. The author describes him is an older Hawaiian who sat with the other men his age at the rack of longboards at Waikiki. He's friends with Duke Kahanamoku and tells him that the Duke saw him swimming [it's "paddling,", another surfing error] from break to break on his board. He calls him a monk seal. A huge compliment. Sharkey quits smoking immediately.
138ff His father comes to watch him surf and is extremely impressed.
139 Another surfing error here, where Uncle Sunshine talks about paddling from the surfboard stand at Waikiki to the surfing breaks at Magic Island: that's like two miles away! Highly unlikely.
141 A chaplain comes to the door to tell his mother that her husband's alive, but he was in a hard helicopter landing. He's being flown home. They see him comatose in the hospital and then soon after he dies. [A few comments on the author's structural choices here: he's now manufactured a small amount of "retrospective sympathy" in the reader by telling the young Sharkey's background story here. Quite honestly, the reader had zero sympathy or even concern for the narcissistic, self-absorbed adult Sharkey that we meet in Part I of the book. It might be a better reading experience if the author started out with young Sharkey, or at least weaved these two threads together in some way: then the reader might actually care one or two whits about the main character.]
Chapter 5: Adrift
142ff Sharkey's father is buried. There is a suspension of hostilities from the bullies at school afterwards, and school actually became a relief for Sharkey from being around his mother and all her despair. "He had no enemies now." The big bully Wilfred brought him a joint, and then later sets him up with a girl in a van to give him a blowjob. "You need dis." [The sudden metamorphosis in Wilfred's character is not particularly credible]. He's not surfing much now, he's smoking weed every day, he's becoming like the other boys. His mother descends into hypochondria and starts drinking more and more heavily, and thus had no idea that Sharkey was high most of the time. The chapter ends with Sharkey getting a talking to from Uncle Sunshine just as he was about to sell his board to Wilfred to buy more weed. Uncle Sunshine leads him into the water in a sort of weird metaphorical baptism scene.
Chapter 6: Rehearsals
150ff Sharkey sees a harsher side of Uncle Sunshine, who now has him running on the beach, doing push-ups, getting in shape, and learning to be grateful to surf rather than to take it for granted. Uncle Sunshine helps him clean up and acts as a mentor and a father figure to him. Sharkey cleans up his act, and then his mother starts developing a bit of sobriety as well; but Sharkey also sees her for what she is--and doesn't like what he sees. She's vain about her looks, she seeks male attention, and the men she starts dating are always either patronizing to him or overtly seeking his approval. One of the men that his mother dates has a rude interaction with Uncle Sunshine that deeply embarrasses Sharkey.
Chapter 7: Wipeout
158ff The surf is up on the North Shore, and as Sharkey imagines his mother's doubts, along with Uncle Sunshine's belief in him, both weighing on him in certain ways, he goes up to the North Shore to surf. But first he reaches out to his friend Harry Ho to ask him to join him. But it's a school day and he's unwilling to take the day off.
163 Sharkey has a really bad wipeout on the one wave he tries for, he's held down for two waves, and then the author again exposes himself with yet another surfing error as he describes Sharkey, held down under the water "slipping the leash over his foot."
Chapter 8: Welcome to the Wave
165ff Uncle Sunshine convinces him to go back to the North Shore: "You got scared shitless, so yah, I think you ready." Sharkey felt like he lost his youth and stupidity on the day of the wipeout.
167ff Sharkey's waiting for the bus, and a pickup truck stops and a young Hawaiian man about his own age picks him up: it's Eddie Aikau. Sharkey doesn't recognize him, and so Aikau explains that he won the Pipeline surf contest last year. They have a whole conversation about surfing. The author then fast forwards to the present and how Sharkey narrates the story years later: how he ges some of the details wrong, adding some things and leaving out the part about the tremendous wipe out the day before. etc. [This scene simply does not work. I can see what the author hopes to do here: he wants to give the book a bit of cinéma vérité, to introduce the famous surfer Eddie Aikau in a plausible way--he is a character in the book as we'll see--but this scene comes off poorly, it comes off as try-hard. The one thing that actually works about this scene is the irony in how Sharkey doesn't know who Eddie Aikau is--just as none of the young surfers knew who Sharkey was early on in the book.]
171ff A scene here on a "localized" part of Pipeline, where the local surfers told Sharkey to get off the wave. But because Eddie Aikau was there and greeted him, the other boys all backed off and let him surf with them.
Chapter 9: Competition
173ff Sharkey keeps improving, he gets more and more respect from Eddie Aikau's group of friends; he signs up for a competition. At home that night he has an argument with his mother and she calls him a disappointment. He replies, "I know I'm a disappointment to you. But I'm not a disappointment to myself." [This is extremely implausible dialogue for a 16-year-old boy.]
177ff He goes to the competition. Surprisingly, his mother shows up with her boyfriend. He does well, although he doesn't win or place, and he gets more respect from the surfing gang on the North Shore. At home his mother mocks him: "You lost." This is just another spur, another challenge for him.
Chapter 10: A Rescue
180ff More conflict between Sharkey and his mother, who's more interested in her boyfriend and doesn't have any idea really of her son's progress surfing. Sharkey finally just drops out of school, and thanks to his connection with Eddie Aikau, gets a job as a full-time lifeguard at Sunset Beach. He rescues a young Japanese girl and he confesses to Aikau that she made him horny; Aikau calls over a surf bunny and she and Sharkey to his car where she enthusiastically gives him head.
"I see you tomorrow, Joe."
"You know me?"
"Everybody see Joe Sharkey, but you nevah pay no attention."
Now Sharkey knows that the girls want him, people know him, he was known, he had friends... he was just oblivious.
Chapter 11: Surf Bunnies
186ff He finds all sort of girls who want to have all kinds of sex with him, they bring him presents and food, etc. He wins a surf contest and the prize was a surfboard and a ticket to Tahiti, so he goes there and finds still more lovers. He returns, telling everybody what the waves are like at the famous Teahupo'o break. He rents a room of his own on the North Shore, and one day his mother comes by with another boyfriend, who tries to give him a pep talk about finishing high school and going to college with the GI Bill. They have a debate about what's actually happening in Vietnam.
Chapter 12: The Year of the Rat
192ff The author falls in love with a petite Chinese surfer girl who, in the distance on the break, he initially mistakes for a boy. The author attempts to blue-pill the reader here, as this new character shows she this isn't just some surf bunny: the main character becomes ashamed of his no-strings-attached sex with all those other girls. This woman is different. She fends off his advances, she doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, she's sort of a Madonna-archetype with a purity that attracts him; she also is close to her family, something he's envious of; he pursues her and eventually she invites him to Chinese New Year's dinner with her family, but she tells him to arrive separately and meet them at the restaurant. The dinner does not go well, "He had never felt so alien." The family doesn't welcome him, but he sees May in her element, enjoying her family. [This is yet another scene that does not really ring true, something seems deeply off about it, and it doesn't seem to have any organic role really in the greater story. This scene and this character could be cut out and the reader would never notice.]
Chapter 13: Naming a Wave
208ff Sharkey learns that there is potentially an unknown wave at Christmas Island, as he hears talk about it from a fisherman. That spring he became the youngest winner of The Pipeline Masters. He arrives at Christmas Island to find another older surfer there, Doc Bowers who tells Sharkey that there's a southerly swell right now and the wave here is insane. Sharkey is disappointed because "his wave"--note wave he thought he was going to discover--is already known. The main character seems to have lost his aloha here as well, he seems weirdly resentful of the people that Doc on the island, he rejects help from people here, he just wants to be alone. [We see another strange mini-morphing of his character that makes little sense.]
212 [More implausibilities] Somehow this teenage island boy now knows how to camp in the bush on a remote Pacific Island, he's pitching a tent, he's got a camp stove, this is yet another implausible leap in his character that's hard to believe, as the author never brought these characteristics out of him, not even hinted at them yet in the story. [Also, you could argue this is another surfing error: you don't just show up to a brand new break and just go out on it.] [Note there's still another surfing and continuity error here as Sharkey sees that this wave is at least a mile or more of a paddle away, but yet earlier in the book, the much older Uncle Sunshine had no problem paddling a minimum of two miles [!] to get from the Waikiki Beach area all the way to Magic Island. But yet a one-mile here is too far for Sharkey.]
216ff Now the reader gets a lecture on the nuclear test performed in the region, and all the birth defects and cancers that resulted, as well as the fact that all the birds were blinded. Later Sharkey surfs the wave alone. He and Doc name the wave "Jimmy's" after James Cook.
Chapter 14: A House at Jocko's
219ff Sharkey saves his money from prizes, endorsements and a life insurance annuity from his father, and is able to buy a house by the sea. Another girlfriend makes an appearance here, her name is Sugar and he marries her [this is an out-of-left field plot development as well]. It turns out sugar is an island girl who just wants a baby, she doesn't even want to leave Hawaii at all, she doesn't surf, she's actually uneasy being so close to the beach because she's worried about being flooded, and she's a poor swimmer. Suddenly their relationship is almost over before it began--this all happens within one page!--and they are quickly divorced. [Again, this seems off, it is not at all organic to the story.]
221ff Sharkey's mother breaks her hip and becomes house-bound, insisting on a wheelchair. She hires a middle-aged Filipina lady as a caregiver who then brings in her "cousin" as a live-in handyman. Sharkey assumes that he is the Filipina lady's lover and that the caregiver intends to get herself written into her mother's will. So Sharkey moves back in with his mother; the caregiver steals some of his mother's jewelry while the handyman makes off with some tools from the garage. And now, just one page later, Sharkey now hates his mother for having to spend every night under her roof with her dishonest complaints. One night she complains of chest pains, he takes her to the hospital and she dies that night of congestive heart failure, barely 60 years old. And then the caregiver and the handyman show up at the cremation, loudly grieving, and then later filed suit to challenge the will. "Yet he was relieved; he'd ridden this wave to the shore, as he had with Sugar. He was unburdened, for you to do what he wished." [Holy cow, this part of the book is very off. It wrongfoots the reader, it isn't organic; the book is becoming a real slog at this point.]
223ff Sharkey flies to South Africa to surf Jeffreys Bay. The taxi driver warns him to stay out of District 6, and that evening that's exactly where he goes; he buys a black woman a beer and she takes him out to an alley to have sex, but he gets anxious and stalls. Frustrated, she says "We could have been finished by now." [The author uses this as an "opportunity" to indirectly lecture the reader on the evils of apartheid-era South Africa as well.] Another implausible scene here where he aggressively orders his driver to take the bus home and leave his car with him, when just a mere page ago he was too afraid to have sex with a woman who led him into an alley. Interesting.
226ff He returns to Hawaii, not at all enjoying his time in Africa. Yet another scene that seems off: his weed supplier of weed introduces to him to his supplier who asks Sharkey to have sex with his wife, but he falls asleep while they're having sex. [This scene also comes out of nowhere. Also, I can't help wondering: what ever happened to May, the virginal Chinese woman with the big family? She just disappeared, stage-hooked right out of the story.] Sharkey now drives to Mexico with a completely random new character named Bingo, a California surfer; during their trip, their van is broken into and his camera stolen.
229ff Then, with no transition, Eddie Aikau is dead, drowned trying to get help when the sailing canoe Hokulea capsized, Now it's the early 1980s, and surfing is now more competitive and bigger money; then three pages after the author tells us how Sharkey is happiest on the North Shore, his character suddenly leaves Hawaii for California: Sharkey now needs a rest, it's not fun there anymore. And now we meet Stella, another tertiary character, who fills Sharkey with desire. [The author's descriptions of her here can only be described as unappetizing]: "After sex in her bedroom--books there too--her odor was much stronger, and when she parted her legs and he clutched her he was reminded of warm fish guts." [Que?] This character wants to get married to Sharkey, but he won't agree; in response she threatens to drown herself.
Chapter 15: I Want Your Life
232ff Sharkey is ambivalent about his life; he's weirded and confused by the wealthy and powerful businessmen around him from the various companies sponsoring him, he feels small around them, but they all want his life.
236ff He meets Hunter [as in Hunter S. Thompson], the one friend who wasn't a hanger-on, Thompson threw nuts at him while he was telling a group of hangers-on about a woman he banged in Somalia. [The scenes here are sort of an irrational pastiche, as the author is probably trying to emulate the vibe of Thompson's life, but the novel is really sagging here under its own weight.] Hunter gives him a huge hug and a pipe full of heroin.
Chapter 16: Mr. Joe
240ff Sharkey is at a sponsor party. Hunter S. Thompson is there too, cavorting with luau dancers and getting drunk. They leave, drive to Waikiki and go to the beach at Magic Island; Hunter howls at the moon; they go to his hotel and he rearranges the furniture. [This scene is also off, it seems implausible and isn't integrated into the story.]
Chapter 17: Reality Check
249ff Sharkey gets occasional random called from Thompson, saying "We should do something." "We gotta do something together." But then Thompson will just randomly show up to Hawaii, forgetting all about it. [These two characters are like two narcissists where the only "gravity" between them is drugs, random chaos, and very little else. It seems as if the author is trying to create a vibe of incongruity, or a vibe of "opposites attract" with these two characters, but their relationship feels not credible, and because of this, the book loses any sense of plot and thread. The reader loses interest. I think a large part of the problem is Sharkey's character has already been clearly established as a self-absorbed narcissist, thus the idea that he would be somehow entranced by another self-absorbed person simply isn't consistent with the behavior of naricssists. The narcissist wants narcissistic supply, not another narcissist!]
251ff Hunter asks Sharkey to get mushrooms; he goes to his friend Moe who provides some, Sharkey tries them, loves it, and then asks Moe to show him where they grow. It's psilocybin, and they grow in cow pastures. Sharkey arranges a mushroom hunt to please Hunter, but Hunter nukes the idea: he hates mosquitoes and he hates hiking... so there was no mushroom hunt. He gives some of the mushrooms to Hunter anyway, he tries them loves it and then writes a fictional passage about it, hands it to Sharkey--who never reads anything--and then Hunter reads it out loud to him.
252ff [Note here where Sharkey narrates to himself (for the benefit of the reader) his feelings of curiosity about and fascination with Hunter Thompson. Once again, this is nothing like what a character like Sharkey would do, on a few levels. He's not curious about or interested enough in other people, and he lacks any kind of mental vocabulary to narrate these thought to the reader like this. What is happening here is the author wants to insert his thoughts about Hunter S. Thompson into his own story, but it just is not plausible that Sharkey would have these thoughts, nor this behavior.]
252ff The rest of this chapter is just Hunter S. Thompson raving, acting badly; it's becoming unreadable. This portion for the book simply doesn't fit organically with the story.
262ff The chapter ends pointlessly, with Hunter calling up Sharkey in the middle of the night, with an incongruous nonsensical conversation. Hunter then shoots himself two days later. The author tries his best to celebrate him with a closing paragraph, but once again it just doesn't work, it doesn't really have a useful function in the novel and doesn't belong.
Chapter 18: The Ultimate Wave
264ff Sharkey mourns the loss of his friend; he had found his legendary hundred foot wave "but had no one to share it with, no one he trusted enough." [Once again, the author is using Sharkey's internal mental narration to describe the loss of Hunter S. Thompson in a way that this character would never narrate! It's not how he would think--it is how the author thinks.] Sharkey is now--without any setup--in Brazil, recovering from knee surgery. He joins another surfer sitting alone and learns about Nazaré: "if someone managed to ride the wave at Nazaré, he can bring luck to the village, and maybe tourists. Maybe money." Sharkey goes back to Hawaii to have a second operation on his knee and spends his time in physical therapy and cross training. The reader now learns indirectly that he has a new girlfriend, Kailani. The minute we learn about her, she threatens to leave him for "selling out" in a very strange, histrionic scene out of nowhere, where she starts crying when the reader barely even knows who she is. "And when she left, taking her tray of sprouts, her sticks of incense, her aromatic candles and her yoga mat, Sharkey was relieved." [Yet another character stage-hooked away!] Sharkey now flies to Portugal, where meets the Brazilian surfer (from a few pages ago), who then takes him to the wave. They have an ethical debate about tow-in surfing. He goes back home and continues to mentally debate tow-in surfing, learning that other major surfers have tried it. [Wait, as an allegedly world-class surfer, he would have already known about this already. If you check your history, it was being done in the mid-90s already on the North Shore. Hunter Thompson died in 2005, thus this is yet another contextual error the author makes about surfing.] He practices tow-in at Hawaii despite frowns and comments from the other surfers. Sharkey's getting old now, and he sees this "as the last public flourish of a long career."
271ff Sharkey gets worried that his "big wave" is coming. He flies to Nazaré and finds out his friend Garrett, who had been helping him learn tow-in surfing, was already there with a whole media team. The next day Sharkey watches Garrett, feeling betrayed, cuckolded; but then as Garrett catches the monster wave and rides it, "Sharkey cheered with the rest of the watchers on the cliff." [Again, strange that this narcissistic, self-absorbed character would go through an incredible transition of deep betrayal to cheering in a matter of minutes. Knowing Sharkey's actual character traits, this is impossible.]
274ff There's a big press conference after Garrett's ride, while Sharkey's own media team hasn't even shown up yet. Sharkey he goes out by himself hiring a jet ski driver who doesn't speak English to tow him out. [There's no way the guy would learn how to do this, no way Sharkey could work out the communication out there on the break or that he could instruct the guy such that the guy could pick it all up... that day. The author is descending into near-constant credulity-stretching here.] Sharkey then sees "the wave he'd been yearning for" and "was glad to be alone for this, the intimacy of this rendezvous, relieved that no one was watching, liberated by being no more than a speck in the sea." [Again, implausible that the character would insta-evolve from narcissist to Zen like this.]
Chapter 19: The Kiss of Life
277ff Sharkey with a fresh tattoo that says "Under the Wave." He's back in Hawaii, old and invisible, at another party at a friend's house, with young surfers pushing past him. "I was a punk like you once, he thought. But I surfed Nazaré, and no one here knows it." Garrett shows up, celebrated by everyone as a hero for serving Nazaré; but then Garrett turns it around and says to Sharkey "You did it! You surfed Nazaré!" and Sharkey responds, "No one saw me." Garrett replies, "That's better, that's humble." Garrett asks Sharkey what he's going to do next, and Sharkey says "I'm done."
280ff Now Olive suddenly reappears in the story: she's called by one of the hosts to help a young man who is bluish and twitching. Olive tells someone to call 911 and then gives him artificial respiration, injects him with something and resuscitates him. Sharkey watches, fascinated. The host then says we're having a paddle-out for Hunter Thompson, and Olive says, "My hero. I always fancied him." And then she looks disapprovingly at Sharkey and says [thinking of the kid who just overdosed], "Hunter Thompson. How staggeringly appropriate."
282ff Finally the paddle out ceremony happens. None of the surfer kids know anything about Hunter Thompson: they think he's a surfer, they have no idea. Once again we're inside Sharkey's head, as he narrates thoughts that Sharkey's character never would have: about Hunter's timidity, his vulnerability, his frailty, etc. He sees Olive on the shore, late to the service because she had to work, and there's yet another implausible scene here where they kiss and Sharkey says to her "Don't leave me. Please."
Part III: The Paddle-Out
Chapter 1: Lies
287ff [The last third of the book is part mystery novel as the two main characters try to find out who Sharkey's victim was.] Now the reader is temporally relocated here to two weeks after Sharkey experienced his bad wipeout: he is too rattled to drive and somehow sprained his wrist as he was snatching at his leash while being held down [again something that does not happen in surfing]. Olive is driving and they approach the place where he hit the guy on the bicycle, and she calls him out on his self-protecting lies about the accident. [Once again this feels way off, we're suddenly now back to the denialist, narcissist, delusional Sharkey who is too shallow to articulate the kind of thoughts he just had a few pages ago about Hunter S. Thompson. The reader is wrenched right out of the story here.] Olive lectures him "there's some sinister shadow over you... We have to make it right." She forces him to narrate the actual event the way it actually happened rather than his misremembered, lying version of events. Then, in full Mary Sue- mode, she takes him to the police station, threatening to go in until he tells her the truth of what happened. "I killed a guy." he finally admits. "Who was he?" she asks.
Chapter 2: Unidentified Male
295ff Olive is disturbed at how childlike Sharkey is behaving in the car on the way to the mortuary. [Once again, this is the guy who recently narrated implausibly multisyllabic thoughts about Hunter S. Thompson in his mind, but yet here he's behaving like a self-absorbed child. This is absolutely not credible to the reader.] The author climbs into Olive's head how and "tells" how she feels motherly towards him [Why? Why would she feel this way to him? Again, this just feels off.] They go to the mortuary and view the body, which is still "unidentified." They have a long discussion with the staffer there, who tells them what was known about the body. Sharkey is at turns nauseated and then elated with the fact that he's still alive. [Again this is strange behavior that is hard to take as credible, it seems off. It is the sort of thing a narcissist might do, the rapid evolutions/devolutions of Sharkey's character are not remotely realistic.]
Chapter 3: Kapu
303 [The lead sentence in this chapter is a good example of this author's occasionally poor style; note how the sentence is a run-on, it lacks a verb, it's too much of a sentence with far too many words, it is unnecessary, and has nothing to do with the actual story. It throws the reader right out of the narrative.] "In the distance a glowing canopy of high leafy boughs in a grove of brittle albizia trees, rising rags of oily smoke, the flare of a campfire, light without much illumination, the whole of it hidden by tall scrub and guinea grass, enclosed by evening shadows."
303ff Olive and Sharkey find a homeless camp that they suspect the victim came from, but they're afraid to go into it because it's late in the day. The author describes how this is sort of an anonymous, hidden homeless zone right near a beach community where everyone had a name or at least a nickname. They go back earlier on another day. They find a couple with children living under a tarp drawn between two cars; the couple knows the man Sharkey hit, and tell them his name: Uncle Mack. Olive and Sharkey are uncomfortable here, and they end up leaving; Sharkey tells Olive that one of the children in the homeless camp reminded him of himself as a boy, and he shares with Olive that he was bullied by the local kids in school. They then see another woman leaving the camp who says "I can help you. I know the guy." Her name is Lindsey; they give her twenty bucks and they come back a couple days later to get more information from her, but she wasn't there.
Chapter 4: Pau
314ff Sharkey and Olive are chagrined at being misled by the homeless woman Lindsey; they're also still trying to grapple psychologically with the homeless camp itself. Sharkey is becoming passive again, smoking a lot of pot, he's stunned, slow and uncertain, and this confuses Olive. There's a voicemail on their home phone, that Sharkey never listened to. It turns out to be the police: they got some "hits" on the victim, plus the police officer has his cousin who really wants to meet Sharkey when he comes in to the station. The cousin ends up making a scene, saying Sharkey "wen' pau." Sharkey becomes enraged, marches over to him and says "I killed a man--he's in the storage room here. I could kill you too." [This is again implausible, given Sharkey's debilitated state here. It's becoming increasingly tiresome to see how the author just uses Sharkey to do any random thing without any character coherence or consistency.]
Chapter 5: Unclaimed Remains
321ff The cop, Olive and Sharkey are looking through the hits that they got about the victim: years ago, he was stopped for driving a car 142mph: it was a Ferrari and it was registered in his name in California. He owned a $3m house in the past, he's got military records, they have all sorts of stuff about this guy. Also the body's been cremated and his ashes are held at the morgue.
326ff Moe, Sharkey's weed supplier, is at his house: he needs a favor. He asks Sharkey to go over and "talk story" at a community center; somehow this will persuade Moe's weed supplier to not beat Moe up. Sharkey agrees, but is depressed when he finds out that there are only a ten young boys at the center. He sees Olive taking a seat in the back and he has a mental reminder of Hunter, feeble, "attended by his nurselike wife." He tells the truth about how a lot of surfers died when on drugs, or got spooked, he talks to the boys about how you lose the stoke as you get old, and then he kind of wigs out in front of them. "Look at me--you don't know who I am!" Skippy yells after him as Sharkey leaves, "Next time, brah, for these keikei, I hope you have a more better message." [This scene is strange: it's random, lacks any real reason or logic to it, and in any event the scene plays no real role in the story at all. Just cut it! Give your readers their ten minutes back.]
Chapter 6: Paperwork
330ff Olive and Sharkey go through the files of the man who died. It turns out he was born in Arkansas, he enlisted at age 18 and went to Vietnam, he was heavily decorated, he came back and got a degree in electrical engineering, he started a software company and he became rich. As they are walking though his life history, Sharkey responds to every new fact with some sort of comment all about himself: "I was lifeguarding then," "my father's war," "he could have been at Mavericks, that's what I was doing around that time." [By now even the most patient reader wouldn't be able to stand this guy. The story has the potential to actually develop some suspense here, but the main character is so unlikable that he ruins it just by being part of his own story.] Olive dresses him down: "You're selfish, narcissistic, and ungrateful. You spent your whole life doing whatever the bloody hell you wanted to, living on your mother's money." [Once again: show, don't tell! A perceptive reader already sees Sharkey's narcissism all along, and a perceptive Olive character--after all she's perceptive enough to basically play therapist with him after the accident--would not have waited till this long in the novel before "naming" his narcissism. IF this novel were to be psychologically realistic, she would have seen the narcissism within days of having met him.] She tells him to "think of it as a quest" they are going to go on a quest to find this guy.
Chapter 7: Floristan
338ff Olive and Sharkey are driving to the airport, on their way to Arkansas to look for Sharkey's victim. [Their dialog is highly implausible here]: he's giving pushback the whole time about the flight being too long, that there are no waves there, he's acting like a six-year-old. Somehow Olive is "heartened" by "the knowledge that he would follow her anywhere now." [Again, deeply implausible. To it a younger woman this would more likely be repulsive, it would be disgusting to her.]
342ff In Floristan, AK, they go from the police station to the town hall, to the high school, to the local library, to all sorts of locations seeking information on Max Mulgrave, Sharkey's victim. Sharkey is protesting and acting inappropriately the whole time as Olive drives. Olive takes them around, interacts with all the people, doing nearly everything here. [This part of the book continues to feel inorganic, implausible.] They find a picture of Max in an old high school yearbook. She sees he was a member of the slide rule club, looks up the other members of the group, and then seeks them out in town. In the local Sharkey starts twirling his finger inside the library's fish aquarium, then argues with the librarian after she asks him to leave the fish alone. Olive yells "Joe!" at him in a sudden fury. [Why does the author include these scenes? What is he trying to do with the characters?]
350ff They learn from one of the old slide rule club members, now the owner of a local repair shop, that Max was teased for being poor and lived in a shack with an outhouse. Just as they are getting up to leave, Sharkey stands up, turns to the man, and tells him "I killed him. I killed Max Mulgrave." [Perhaps the author wanted this to be a scene of catharsis, or mini-catharsis, as the Sharkey character begins to make good, but the scene fails: it does not feel right, it doesn't feel plausible.] The next morning they get a call from the deeds office in town, they found a house in the name of Eva Mulgrave paid for by Max Mulgrave, with an address back in Hawaii.
Chapter 8: The Leeward Side
353ff They return to Hawaii, they go to his Mulgrave's old address, but Sharkey is afraid to get out of the car when they arrive to the house. There's a local man living there now who's aggressive and tells them to leave. As they get in their car to leave, a police officer pulls up who happens to know Max, who knows him to be a good guy: he takes them to one of Max's friends in another homeless encampment. As Sharkey goes up to a group of three hostile men at the encampment, one of them turns out to be member of his old bully's crew at his old high school. Sharkey then learns that Wilfred, the main bully, died from too many drugs. The man gets up and suddenly hugs Sharkey and as a result the group then becomes more open to him and another of the three guys, Frawley, admits that he knows Max. Olive and Sharkey learn that Max sold his software company to his employees [a device here by the author to illustrate that he did the right thing for all of his workers].
361ff Olive asks Frawley how he knows so much about Max's business, and it turns out Frawley was a senior accountant with the biggest firm in Honolulu; a CPA with a life, but he stole money from his firm. Frawley explains all that Max did for the community, giving money to the health center, donating computers to the high school, etc. The guys had no idea he was dead.
Chapter 9: A Dog Off His Leash
365ff Olive and Sharkey take two of the guys in their car to find some of Max's old haunts; first his house, then a van he lived in after he got busted, etc. They ask Olive and Sharkey for money, and the conversation goes quickly downhill as they're driving around.
Chapter 10: A Protected Species
373ff Olive puts two and two together, noting that Max had many, many run-ins with the police, but was never written, up never charged: something's amiss and so she wants to go back to talk to the reporting officer Ronald DeSouza [Again, it's hard to imagine such a perceptive Mary Sue figure who somehow still remains unable to perceive or do anything about the toxicity of her relationship with Sharkey!] They go back to meet with the original reporting officer, DeSouza, to tell him that the victim was Max Mulgrave. DeSouza can't believe it. He tells him that Max was "a protected species," and that you'd get in big trouble from the chief if you busted Max Mulgrave. DeSouza doesn't know all the details but he knows that Max did some kind of big favor for somebody.
277ff They meet Deputy Chief of police, Malo, who when he hears about Max dying, goes through odd, sudden convulsions of grief. Deputy Chief Malo tells them that Max had all sorts of issues with the police: speeding, DUI, vagrancy, loitering, but the deputy chief had all the charges dropped on his orders. He pulls out a DVD of a memorial service for a young woman and plays it for them: it was of a young woman, a sex worker, who was murdered. Max paid for the whole service, a lot of money. It also turns out that he funded all of the police work to catch the murderer, and also upgraded the police force's equipment, paying for lawyers, even paying one of the police officer's medical bills.
Chapter 11: Smack
383ff That night in bed, Olive wakes up and finds Joe out of the house without his phone. She calls up Moe Kahiko, Sharkey's weed dealer, to help look for him. They find him at the beach: it appears that he was trying to drown himself. She asks Moe to come with them to the homeless encampment the next day, it turns out that Moe not only knows the people there, but he also knows Max--but by a different name--and sold him all kinds of drugs. Sharkey openly admits killing Max to them all [again, if you know narcissism, you know this is an unrealistic leap for this character]. It turns out Max had set up a trust fund for the kids of one of the women at the homeless encampment. One of the homeless guys there, Kimo, tells them they have take the documentation to the bank where the trust funds are held. Finally, at the end of the chapter Moe--referring to one of the stories Sharkey has retold multiple times across this book--tells Olive and Sharkey that the big shipment of weed he accidentally shipped to Sharkey's mailbox years ago was supposed to be delivered to Max. He tells them that Max had loved watching Sharkey surf, and thought Sharkey was a hero. [I guess this is supposed to be like a mystery that resolves at the end, tying up all the threads, but it just all seems utterly implausible, not believable, and worst of all, unengaging. At this point the reader just wants the story to be over. But wait! Impossibly, it's going to become even more unengaging...]
Chapter 12: The Release
392ff There's one last person to go to: Max's ex-wife, who needs to sign a release so Sharkey can take care of Max's burial. She lives in California, and Sharkey has to go there alone, because Olive's leave of absence [which the author failed to mention at all previously] has come to an end. Sharkey here dwells on his relationship with Olive [in ways that his character absolutely wouldn't]: he thinks back to how they met, how she's become a mother figure to him, how he's become dependent on her and fearful without her, etc.
395ff There's another weird, implausible and superfluous scene here as Sharkey, on the plane next to a travel writer, has a half-conversation with her, and then he falls asleep mid-conversation. [If this author cut out everything in this book unnecessary to the story, it would be 190 pages and readable, rather than 400+ pages and unreadable.]
397ff He arrives to the ex-wife's house: she and her husband are wealthy. Sharkey tells the whole story: about the accident and about how things started to go wrong in his life afterward. The ex-wife has an interrupting answer for every statement he makes. [Her comportment here seems reminiscent, in a repulsive way, of Sharkey's behavior earlier in the book when Olive attempted to get him to admit culpability for the accident]. He learns the ex-wife's new husband is a hairdresser, and Sharkey's emotions flip instant from growing anger at the ex-wife to absolute hilarity. He can't stop laughing; he's choking, he's laughing so hard. And then the ex-wife refuses to sign the release. [Is the author trying to imitate Hunter S. Thompson's writing here? I can't tell, but either way it doesn't work.] Sharkey goes back to his hotel, and later the ex-wife comes to the hotel to sign the paper after all. She then asks him to kiss her. [Ew? This is a completely not credible scene. Why would the author do this?] The next day Sharkey walks down to the Santa Monica beach and teaches some kids how to boogieboard paying for their board rentals and teaching them for free. They ask him who he is, and he says "I'm nobody--average Joe."
Chapter 13: The Paddle-Out at Waimea
407ff The police officers, Sharkey's surfing friends, the homeless people and their kids, Sugar [Sharkey's ex-wife] and May and her Chinese husband came [why in the world would these characters be here after simply vanishing without a trace from the story so many pages ago?] as well as several other characters from the story are all here [including the author himself, via an odd self-reference here. "Moe was there. So was I."] The group is going to perform a "paddle out" with Max's ashes into Waimea Bay for a traditional Hawaiian send-off. Sharkey is in the center as he scatters the ashes, and everyone throws their leis into the center of the circle and slaps the water. And as Sharkey paddles back to shore, there's a little bump of a wave that begins pushing his board, so he gets to his knees, then to his feet, and then rides the wave.
To Read:
Hunter S. Thompson: The Curse of Lono
Walter Bradford Cannon: The Wisdom of the Body
Walter Bradford Cannon: The Way of an Investigator