Whalefall Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
“You are fish food, kid. All this plastic is getting in the way of our animal duty. Which is: we gotta eat each other, over and over, to keep this carousel turning round.”
Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel Whalefall is a survival story with a lot to say about grief that will have you both mesmerized and in tears.
Jay, on a mission to find his late father’s remains in the ocean bay where he died by suicide, is swallowed by a whale and must navigate both getting out AND his tense relationship with his father, even after his death. The whole story takes place over the course of an hour, keeping up a burning, fast pace with a PSI countdown as each chapter title, reminding us how little air Jay has left in his tank. The effect on me was a whirlwind reading experience; urgently turning each page to find out what happens next. A truly exciting story, it’s also about suicide and the cycles of life.
I wept as I read scenes between Jay and his dead father inside the whale where my own insecurities over my father’s suicide came up. Not at all bleak, rather joyous and tender, the text explores the apologies made between parent and child when our discernment can clear and we witness one another’s shortcomings with grace. Suicide is tough to face, tough to grieve. It’s his time in the whale that forces him to meet his father in a new light. In a way, Jay needed the whale, as the story reveals over and over again. Inside the whale, as he troubleshoots a stream of ideas to escape, he contemplates his father’s suicide and his period of illness. When Jay’s family surrounded his father with his cancer diagnosis, Jay stayed away, despite constant prodding from his sisters and mother to be by his father’s side as he dies. After a tumultuous childhood with his father, Jay can’t bring himself to be there. But inside the whale’s stomach(s), after his father’s suicide, Jay has nowhere to run or hide from his father whose nautical legacy lives on in the whale itself.
Kraus colors in the often unseen parts of grieving suicide. Jay understands his father’s suicide; the cancer was brutal and death was imminent. He wanted to die in the sea, his one true love. So, in the whale, Jay isn’t coming to grips with the motivations behind the suicide, rather the fortune of lost opportunities between father and son to love one another. As Jay confronts his own mortality, his hard vision of his father— built by resentment, anger, and dashed hopes over years and years— thaws, replaced by a warmer tenderness that allows for imperfection even in the most dire of circumstances— like being eaten alive.
On top all of that, on a much less serious note, I learned a lot about whales. And they are AWESOME. A bit gory and full of awe and wonder at the animal kingdom, animal fans will adore this book.
Readers who are in search of new settings, high stakes, efficient pacing, and a text that transports you, Whalefall is for you.