To illustrate my last remark:
Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark.
What did they do, just when everything seemed so dark?
They said you have to ac-cent-u-ate the positive,
e-lim-i-nate the negative,
latch onto the affirmative.
Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.
--Johnny Mercer
If you know these Johnny Mercer lyrics and the Harold Arlen tune to which they are set, then you are likely to summon that song repeatedly once you get into Whale Fall, Daniel Kraus’s astonishing tour-de-force of a novel. It’s the most audacious book I have read all year, and it manages a miracle of story-telling by delivering a profound meditation on death in the form of a beat-the-clock thriller. Ernest Hemingway claimed in For Whom the Bell Tolls that a person can live a full life in three-score-and-ten hours, not years. Kraus reduces Hemingway’s allotted time to one jaw-dropping hour in this Hemingway-esque yet entirely original tale that he might have called The Young Man and the Sea. Jay Gardiner is 17 years old when he sets out to dive off the Pacific coast in search of his drowned father’s bones. We meet Jay in a first chapter titled “3000 PSI,” and don’t worry if the term mystifies you; the explanation will come soon enough. And if you’re getting annoyed with me for being so vague about the plot, please consider that I’m trying to avoid spoilers. (Although my quoting Johnny Mercer’s lines as epigraph might qualify as a major spoiler indeed.) Let me just assure you that Daniel Kraus has employed extensive research for dazzling effects and that, in the process, he settles forever any question of whether the Biblical story of Jonah is figurative or literal. I stayed up late to finish this thrilling novel, and I am recommending it to every serious reader I know.
Johnny Mercer’s words might also apply with only a bit of strain to John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry, another fine novel with a young protagonist on a quest to reunite with a missing family member. Jessilyn Harney’s mother died in childbirth; her father died when she was a teen; and her brother Noah (see how much I’m straining to connect Mercer’s lyrics to this novel?) has become a notorious outlaw. We’re far from Jay Gardiner’s ocean and the modern day in this increasingly unsettling tale set in the dusty, unforgiving American West of the 19th Century, but never once do we tire of the company of Jess, our stalwart narrator, even when her story takes strange but irresistible turns. Orphaned and alone, she chops off her hair and disguises herself as a young man. She has also taught herself to shoot, and her skill as a sharpshooter leads her into both triumph and catastrophe as she searches for the increasingly infamous Noah. Their reunion echoes strongly Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” in a surreal masked ball in an oasis of sham civility surrounded by bleakness and anarchy, and their subsequent adventures culminate in an ending that’s simultaneously heartbreaking, cathartic, and deeply satisfying. Larison and Kraus together fill me with joy for the state of American letters. There are so many superb writers out there, and these two, both in their forties and roughly five years apart, have delivered knockout work in what I hope will be the early stage of their careers.