Don’t be misled by the jacket of Kathleen Rooney’s MAN OVERBOARD!, starting with that exclamation mark at the end of the title. The cover art shows a man floating on his back in an ocean rendered in cheerful green brush strokes. Above the title, which has a canted MAN tilting into a submerged OVERBOARD, floats a colorful life preserver from which unscrolls a message from Adriana Trigiani: “Destined to be the BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER.” Everything you see implies a lighthearted misadventure, and the physical size of the book—under 200 pages, and surely under 50,000 words long—suggests a disposable beach read. Indeed, when we first meet the protagonist, Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick, he has just fallen from a cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico and is shedding his clothes to help himself stay afloat. He can’t remember how he ended up in the water because he was seriously drunk until this sudden immersion has somewhat sobered him up. We’re all set for hijinks and comedy. We are wrong. This slim novel becomes increasingly suspenseful and philosophical as Kick floats alone in the gulf waters on Thanksgiving Day and considers the life that threatens to be over.
One early clue that we’re about to read something meatier than a screwball comedy arrives almost immediately, with epigraphs from Moby Dick and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. Then in a series of brief chapters, the first of which starts at a quarter to midnight on the night before Thanksgiving Day, we learn that Kick has always been afraid of the ocean but is a skilled, physically fit swimmer. Everything else takes place hour by hour on the holiday itself. With every chapter we learn more and more about Kick’s family, his relationships, and his problems. Reported in his initially sardonic voice, which gives way to something more somber, more serious, more poignant, Kick’s immersion takes a while to become no laughing matter. As he becomes more and more exhausted, he has a series of hallucinatory conversations with sea creatures, conversations that we readers understand to be interior psychodramas as Kick interrogates his choices and finally admits how he came to fall into the water in the first place.
How serious I am in praising this novel: When my caregiver interrupted my reading because it was time for a trip to my weekly physical therapy session, I told her that I couldn’t leave yet because I had five more pages to read and had to know what was going to happen. It’s been a long time since I’ve been unable to put a book down.
It’s also been a long time since I was sad to see a book end, but that was the case with Douglas Stuart’s JOHN OF JOHN, the antithesis of MAN OVERBOARD! in every way: a long, rich tale with a large cast of characters and a setting that, paradoxically, is more immersive than the ocean where Kick Kilpatrick treads water. Set on an island modeled on the Isle of Harris in the Scottish Hebrides, the novel features the Macleod family, starting with son Cal, who is gay but can’t come out to his conservative Presbyterian father. This father, John, also has a secret that he cannot share with his son. Cal’s grandmother, Ella, serves as catalyst, mediator, irritant, and comic relief for the two men, father and son, with whom she shares a house. Cal’s mother has moved out to take up living with her husband’s brother. Once we learn these bare facts, we think that we have these characters pegged, but we are mistaken. They are all dynamic, full of surprises that unfold at a brisk pace, and as we get more and more acquainted with them, the more invested we become in their fates.
Stuart doesn’t coddle his readers. We have to gather on our own what a croft is, what a blackhouse is, what a whitehouse is, how the weaving of tweed is governed by strict rules—as is the local church—and how the traditional Gaelic of the island can serve to exclude those who only speak English from following a conversation. But Stuart is a gifted enough artist to know just how much exposition to provide for us to avoid confusion. Almost instantly his language draws us into this remote world where at first we may feel like awkward tourists but soon become part of the community. Like Kathleen Rooney, Douglas Stuart writes a story that always threatens tragedy and delivers self-discovery and reconciliation, but by operating on such a larger scale than Rooney, Stuart supplies more substance, more breathtaking twists of plot (all of which are entirely believable) and a conclusion that leaves us touched and awed.