At first it's an idyllic life, but events trigger reminiscence, examination of self-truths and recalibration. All backdropped by a superbly knowledgeable description of surfing life, amateur and professional

Set in Hawaii, Theroux gives us an epic novel about a surfer who accidentally kills a man and looks back on his life: Surf champion Joe Sharkey is now 62 and has been famous in his profession for about 45 years. Ageing, lonely and with his relevance dwindling, Joe ponders how to proceed, and how to deal with his current situation.

Atmospheric and evocative, Theroux masterfully writes Hawaii and surfer culture. This novel is for people who don't mind excessive detail though, also when it comes to Joe's backstory: The text moves back and forth like the tide, and the topic of memory is played out in lengthy descriptions.

Living in Hawaii and seeing the surfing culture close and personal, this book was close to home. The story of Joe growing up and feeling as an outsider (haole boy) bullied for such and then growing into a great surfing on an endless quest for the perfect surfing conditions and the perfect wave was such a good one. There are not many words but this is one i will definitely recommend to others.

For the kind of a killer vacation one may never get to go on, this book seemed magical. It’s all about the waves, from title to cover to contents. And about one man who has made chasing and riding the waves his entire life. Joe Sharkey, the perfectly named protagonist, is a sort of aquatic animal with a sole purpose to his life. A purpose he has pursued for decades to great success, but now he is his 60s and a tragedy makes him pause and reflect on his life.
And we, the readers, get dragged along for the ride.
It hasn’t always been smooth surfing for Joe, he struggled to fit in with the local islanders from the time he was just a young white boy there, a military brat, an outsider. Eventually he discovered surfing and never looked back. It became his entire life. And a good life, too, as he became an accomplished wave rider, with sponsorships and fans. A comfortable life too, with a financial cushion from his parents to have as a safety net. An easy and a mostly happy life of a man who has been fortunate enough to follow his bliss for most of his years.
It made Joe an easy going, relaxed local fixture, popular with everyone, including the ladies. Now his current squeeze, a woman 24 years his junior, seems to be a more serious presence in his life than most of her predecessors and she finds Joe at his absolute lowest following a vehicular crash in which he kills a man, a drunken bum on a bike, or so it seems.
The guilt wrecks Joe and nothing in his life seems to go right afterwards, so he sets off to find out who the man was, in an effort to put things right, to honor the dead.
So the book has three acts, present day Sharkey, Sharkey childhood to present day and Sharkey playing the guilt driven detective.
It also has plenty of surfing. Tons of surfing, really. It’s as close as one can get to surfing without getting their feet wet.
Overall, it’s a good read, it’s certainly a compelling one. The thing is, it’s quite long. And it reads long too. Sure, it’s meant to span an entire life, 6 plus decades, but it’s also very leisurely paced.
Sharkey’s a likeable protagonist, the essential cliché of an aged wave rider, seasoned, waterbeaten old timer, a yarn spinner extraordinaire, who’s never read a book, but lived and traveled well and widely. Sharkey carries the book as easily as he does his surfboard, though his story doesn’t quite speed along the same way he does through the water.
Theroux is a very good author and he’s had plenty of practice perfecting his craft, so his writing is smooth and easy, but it’s also indulgent and pays for it in dynamics.
And Sharkey, for all his immediate likeability, may not be the most layered, original or sympathetic of characters when you analyze him critically.
It’s a perfectly decent read and a very credible armchair surfing experience, but it isn’t an easily recommendable book and certainly won’t work for everyone. Thanks Netgalley.

Surf’s up!

Or in protagonist Joe Sharkey’s case, the surf is…not quite as up as it used to be, metaphorically speaking, as Joe’s life has taken a few rough turns since the waning of his career as a big wave rider.

On the whole I enjoyed Paul Theroux’s latest, though it was not without issues, most notably that if you’re not a surfer or someone with some sort of interest in/connection to surfing, the rest of the story as it exists really isn’t enough to carry the book.

Let’s start with the good: This is a beautiful paean to surfing, to surf culture, and to the ocean, and Theroux paints all of that beautifully and compellingly with his prose. Joe is a good character, full of nuance and contradictions, likable but flawed. I found most of his life story and more specifically his surf story riveting.

At the other end of things, I didn’t love the major plot point of the accident and how it wove in with the rest of Joe’s story. And on a related note, I don’t think I’ve disliked a character who is intended to be liked as much as I disliked Olive in a very long time.

I also could have done without the Hunter S Thompson bromance during the look-back into Joe’s past. Is there anything more trite and boring than the male gaze slathering all over Hunter S Thompson? Sigh.

But that aside, the examination of Joe’s past and the journey through his career was probably the best part of the book.

If you’re a surfer like me or even a surfing enthusiast, you’ll likely be able to get past the weaker parts of this story in order to enjoy the more surf-centric aspects of it. If you’re just looking for a novel, Theroux has other books which are better from nose to tail that are more worth exploring.

I love Paul Theroux's books and loved this one.
It's as engrossing and fascinating as usual, great character development and descriptions.
Another great book by this beloved author.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

If you are an avid traveller – or should I say “were” under current circumstances – of the armchair or real-life variety you, would know the prolific American author and travel-writer Paul Theroux. Over his 60+ years of writing he has amassed a catalogue of around fifty books which include both non-fiction and fiction. Under the Wave at Waimea falls into the last category.

Full review here: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/03/under-the-wave-at-waimea-paul-theroux/

Long a Theroux fan, I was elated to received a copy of this book. The life of aging big-wave surfer Joe Sharkey is so well written that I was dismayed to finish this novel. Although his best days are behind him, Joe still finds himself so comfortable in the water that his time in the ocean is timeless. An exploration into a man's choice of life and lifestyle, this is a recommended read.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 13, 2021

Paul Theroux’s new novel takes as its plot the life of a surfer. For a time, his life seems too superficial to sustain a plot. Joe Sharkey is a high school dropout, a stoner who — apart from a gig in his youth as a lifeguard — has never had a job. Millionaires envy Sharkey, “they wanted his friendship, they praised his life, the life he had made out of accident and desperation and dumb luck, his whole existence a form of escape, fleeing to the water to be himself and protecting himself on land by telling lies about his life.” Sharkey seems mindlessly happy, untroubled because he is disconnected from the ordinary concerns that plague the rest of us. How could such an empty life be interesting? In the literary hands of Theroux, anything is possible.

As the novel begins, Sharkey is 62, still surfing, but battling aches and doubts. He is a legend whose fame and skills are both diminishing. Theroux is 80 and, at least as a writer, has not diminished a bit. The story is about aging, but it is also about atonement and the search for meaning in life. In the novel’s last third, Sharkey’s mindless happiness has become mindful regret. There is more to life than happiness, Theroux reminds us. Under the Wave at Waimea suggest that true happiness can’t be attained without true understanding. “If I don’t know myself,” Sharkey asks near the novel’s end, “how can you possibly know me?”

The story is told in three parts. The first and last take place in Sharkey’s present. The middle of the novel constructs the details of Sharkey’s life. As an Army brat whose father wants him to go to West Point and serve in Vietnam, Sharkey gets kicked out of a private school for smoking weed and refusing to rat out his source. He’s ostracized as a haole in a public school but escapes the bullies by isolating himself on a surfboard. Over the years, building a life from sun and sea, Sharkey wins competitions, gets endorsement contracts, has sex with beach bunnies, and travels the world, never once reading a book or thinking that his life is missing anything worthwhile. He forms a superficial attachment to Hunter Thompson but never troubles himself to read the autographed copy of a book that Thompson gives him. Eventually Sharkey meets Olive, a kind and patient woman who loves Sharkey despite his faults, including his self-absorption, his unthinking failure to make her a meaningful part of his life.

The novel’s first part leads to its defining moment as a buzzed Sharkey, driving in the rain on a dark night while telling Olive a story from his past, hits and kills a homeless bicycle rider. Sharkey tells the cop who shows up that he hadn’t been drinking. The cop, recognizing Sharkey as a legendary surfer, doesn’t seem interested in investigating the death of a homeless man. When Olive presses Sharkey to discuss his role in the death, Sharkey dismisses it as inconsequential, but something about the death changes Sharkey, reduces him, makes him feel his age and steals his motivation to surf. Sharkey’s near drowning and Olive’s miscarriage send the message that a dark cloud is hanging over a life that Sharkey has always regarded as sunny and carefree.

The last part of the novel picks up the story of an unfocused Sharkey who is smoking too much weed and surfing too little, still refusing to acknowledge the importance of killing another human being. Tired of listening to Sharkey respond to her confrontation with “he was a homeless drunk,” Olive embarks on a quest to reconstruct the man’s life. He might have been a homeless drunk when he died, but she learns that he was much more than that during his life. Even in hard times, he was a trusted friend, an inspiration to those who knew him.

The quest takes Olive (with Sharkey in tow) to Arkansas and back to Hawaii, where they meet men who have fallen on hard times, including some Sharkey knew in his childhood. Olive forces Sharkey to add up his life, the life in which he feels so much pride, and stack it up against the remarkable highs and tragic lows of the life made by the man Sharkey dismisses as a “drunk homeless guy.”

Theroux is among the best painters of word pictures. From faces to fingernails, from rocky shores to moonglow on a distant headland that looks like “an outstretched paw,” Theroux’s descriptive prose invites visualization. Hawaii, of course, is a remarkable place to visualize. Theroux captures not just the beaches and waves but the beauty of a culture that values integrity and truth while practicing the ugliness of racial judgment. Sharkey believes that Hawaii’s beauty is pure, that everything ugly about the islands — drugs, shoes, plastic bags, crime scene tape — comes from the mainland. Sharkey only belatedly wonders whether he is part of the ugliness that has contaminated the native purity.

There is a lot to unpack in Under the Waves at Waimea. To some degree, the novel is about white privilege. Sharkey is a haole, scorned by many native Hawaiians until he proves himself as a surfer, but he gets endorsement contracts that better, native surfers never seek. Late in the novel Sharkey is accused of having “snobbed” his native peers. For the most part, the novel is about self-discovery, about the importance of kindness and the need to put aside self-satisfaction to live a truly happy life. But it is also about setting aside judgment, about recognizing the complexity and value of others, about not basing opinions on one sliver of a multi-faceted life. There is some redundancy in Theroux’s effort to make his points — there isn’t much subtlety here — but the points he makes are important and the story is both moving and memorable.

RECOMMENDED

Disclosure: I received a copy of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

It is always nice to find a new (to you) writer that you really like, especially one that has already written a ton of books to fill your TBR for the next few years. Ignoring the raised eyebrows at taking so long to read such a famous and highly regarded author like Paul Theroux isn’t so difficult. We all have reasons (or lack thereof) for not getting around to a particular writer I guess, probably mostly to do with the fact that we need to do boring and time consuming things like work and sleep. Oh well, I rejoice nonetheless.

I echo what several others have stated that I loved the first and last third of this book and felt that the middle third was a distraction to a truly compelling story. The first third tells a heart wrenching yet satisfying account of how Joe, an army brat in Hawaii (a mainlander) tries at first to fit in to his surroundings but then decides to escape to the waves and join the joyous and free surfer culture to become “the Shark”—a famous and successful surfer. The tragic relationships between Joe and his father and mother felt realistic to me and Joe was a counter-culture David Copperfield of sorts. This is where I first started asking myself how I missed out on reading Theroux and added several of his books to my TBR pile. His expertise as a travel writer is in full display and his deftness at characterization and the internal thought processes of his main character team up for a truly compelling narrative. This level of artistry only comes with the best writers.

The first part of the novel ends with a traumatic event that stops Joe dead in his tracks, although he does his best to ignore its significance—and this almost kills him. Skipping over the middle section for a moment, the third part tells the story of how Joe (sometimes on his own, but often forced) moves to consider something beyond himself and discover the history of a homeless man that he has run over and killed mostly due to his own negligence. Joe spent most of his life ignoring the world around him, which he felt judged, rejected and abused him, to create the larger than life personality of “the Shark” which was both his alter ego and his refuge. The Shark didn’t care about other people, just about waves, his surfer family, and avoiding the real world and real relationships because real relationships made demands on him. In order to save himself, he needed to research the life story and resurrect the man behind the anonymous drifter that he killed and in the process he heals and even recreates himself to where he no longer needs to be the Shark—to where he is comfortable for once in his life to be “just Joe.” I found Under the Wave a Waimea to be a thoroughly satisfying read. As an aside, as someone who was an army brat and school kid in the 70s in Kailua, Oahu I found his descriptions of Joe’s way of life very accurate.

My issue with the middle third is that I feel that the book is about first and foremost Joe and his journey. In the middle section Joe meets a larger than life character that throws the spotlight off of him and sucks up all the oxygen in the story. Joe meets and spends time with gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson and during this entire section the story takes a detour into Thompson’s life and doesn’t resume its true course until the focus returns to Joe. Others may disagree but I found this section knocked the novel off course and it would be a much better book without it. I also don’t feel that it added anything to Joe’s journey and was therefore an unnecessary distraction.

I can't believe I never read him before but you bet I will now. So good! Interesting character study in a beautiful setting with good characters who were well developed. Loved it

This novel moves around a lot. In the best of ways. The writing about surfing is bang on. I felt like I was on a wave again at times. Then the book shifts as a tragedy occurs. It begins to bounce around in time, moving in and out of Sharkey's different worlds.
In the end, it's certainly a book about surfing. It's also a book about relevance. What is a life well lived? How do you know? Why do we search for fame? What good is it in the end?

I enjoyed this endlessly, and now that it's over I wish I could jump right back in and ride those big waves with Sharkey again and again.

Are famous people really more interesting than the rest of us? Our culture seems to believe this, but there isn't much evidence that it is true. This book about a famous old white man who ends up killing another famous old white man is a very long slog. It finally picks up in the last third, but that is too little, too late. Sorry, I can't recommend this.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author, for an ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
The synopsis of this book sounded intriguing to me so I requested a copy to read.
Unfortunately, I have tried reading this book on 2 separate occasions and during this 2nd attempt, I have
decided to stop reading this book
and state that this book just wasn't for me.
I wish the author, publisher and all those promoting the book much success and connections with the right readers.

As I age, I find that I prefer my anonymity. I’ve tasted fame, a little bit of it, and have to admit that it isn’t what it’s cracked up to be — people, it seems, just want to pull you down off the pedestal, so fame is incredibly exhausting to maintain if you want to be viewed with any dose of positivity. The protagonist in Paul Theroux’s latest novel, Under the Wave at Waimea, has the opposite problem, though. Joe Sharkey is a 62-year-old surfer from Hawaii, and he is struggling to retain his relevance. He’ll go to parties where there are younger surfers, and nobody there seems to recognize him or understand who he is — which is as something of a local celebrity among Hawaiians of a certain age. He wants to be known and remembered, and he tells stories about his past to anyone who’ll listen. The problem is, he only has so many stories about himself, so he repeats himself at times, sometimes even embellishing the stories with untruths. Thus, Under the Wave at Waimea is a story that looks back on a life that’s been lived and seeks to set the record straight. At least, it does so in part.

The novel is also about privilege. Joe Sharkey is enough of a name that when he runs over a drugged-up, homeless man on a bike with his car and kills him, he pretty much gets away with it, despite having at least three beers in his system. However, because Sharkey has bad luck from the moment of the accident onward, even nearly drowning at one point, he and his girlfriend Olive — who is much younger than him at 38-years-old — set out to find out who the nameless victim was as a human being, and then to honor him with a funeral procession at sea. Most of the detective work is done by Olive, but, gradually, Sharkey comes to take responsibility in his role in the accident, which is fitting for, as a surfer, he has known no responsibility other than to himself and the monster waves he seeks out to conquer.

Under the Wave at Waimea is a long book. It covers a lot of ground from the contemporary mystery story involving the accident victim to a biography of Joe Sharkey, as a professional surfer. This book is really two (or three) novels bundled into one and will take you some time to read — particularly since there isn’t an awful lot of dialogue in the novel that takes up a lot of space. The book also starts a little slowly, but your patience will be rewarded if you stick with this tome. It is fiercely fascinating and wonderfully poetic — which is apt because Paul Theroux is most known as a travel writer, perhaps more so than for his fiction writing. (He did write The Mosquito Coast, which was made into a movie with Harrison Ford in the ’80s, so there’s that.) Even though I’m pretty sure that much of this book is fiction, it, at times, scans as autobiography.

The reason it does is due to the fact Theroux has lived in Hawaii for a long time. He imbues this book with the dialect and customs of native Hawaiians. However, there are touches of the personal life in this novel, too. For instance, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is a minor character (with lines) in the book, and the “friendship” between Sharkey the surfer and Thompson the writer is chronicled. It is an unlikely friendship because Sharkey is the type of guy who will never read a book; however, there’s something about the wildly unpredictable behaviour of Thompson’s antics that draws Sharkey to him. Even though the novel is fiction, you’re left wondering as a reader as to how much of this “fiction” is true and if Theroux knew Thompson intimately, and how much of Under the Wave at Waimea is a stab at autobiographical writing. I had to wonder how much surfing Theroux has done in his life because he writes about the subject with authority and clarity. The book feels true in its precision and attention to detail.

Under the Wave at Waimea is something of a masterpiece from a master writer. Yes, I did find that the book often circles back upon itself and repeats itself many, many times, which becomes something of a distraction, but I had to wonder as to the deliberateness as this as a flourish. Does the author repeat himself as a form of dementia at growing older? Or does he repeat himself as the teller of tales of a finite life? (Even Haruki Murakami has been known to repeat symbolism in his later books that were first used in some of his earlier ones.) I’m leaning towards the latter and not the former — it is an authorial tick. As Joe Sharkey grows as a character and comes to accept his role in the fatal crash and his privilege that protects him from serious repercussions, new layers are added onto him which will possibly lead to new, more truthful versions of the stories he tells.

This is the book about the making of a hero — once as a surfer, and once as an aging man who has done something wrong. Under the Wave at Waimea is a lot of things, but you can take it as a great surfing yarn filled with colorful characters and dialect that almost teaches you how to read the book as it goes on. There’s a lot to think about with this novel, and it is a challenging book without being overly complicated or hard to read. I’m pretty sure this is the kind of book that might get added to the syllabuses of university English courses, as there’s a lot that can be said about this book. At the end of the day, as the sun sets on the green surf of the Pacific, Under the Wave at Waimea is a book with few, and only minor wipeouts — and, as such, is a marvel to behold. Indeed, this is a gem of a novel about a life lived recklessly on the ocean and I’m now glad to attach my name to such a reveal.

An ageing surfer in Hawaii. A man who has spent his whole life living for surfing, on an endless quest for the biggest, the perfect wave. Bullied at school as a child for being a “haole”, a white boy, he finds his refuge and his safety in the surf. Famous for a while, he’s now facing increasing irrelevance as his place is taken by younger surfers, many of whom haven't even heard of him. And then things get even harder to handle when an accident challenges his sense of self-worth and his whole way of life. I found this a surprisingly compelling read, even though I have no interest in surfing. That really doesn’t matter as at its heart is the story of man becoming increasingly old and vulnerable. Joe Sharkey is a larger than life character and ultimately a very empathetic one. And in fact I actually enjoyed the surfing parts of the book. Theroux writes with great authority and vividness, and I could really sense the skill in riding and the excitement of surviving those big waves. I also very much enjoyed the portrait of Hawaiian life and society, in all its complexity. A couple of aspects of the book didn’t work so well for me, which make it a 4* rather than the 5* read it so nearly was. The quest to discover the other man involved in the accident goes on for far too long. And the introduction of Hunter S Thompson into the narrative is not only unnecessary but actually irritating. I understand that Theroux knew Thompson so perhaps this is intended as some sort of homage. But not only does the episode add nothing to Joe’s story, but it distracts by being a portrait of a particularly unlikeable man whose excesses are neither interesting nor admirable. And it all makes an already long book even longer to no good end. However, these are relatively minor quibbles as overall I really enjoyed this well-written and interesting novel and I was engaged by it pretty much throughout.

Joe Sharkey is a big wave surfer. At sixty two maybe his best days are behind him, but when he wakes every day his first thought is still to check out how the waves are today, and living on Hawaii’s North Shore he’s in the perfect spot to take advantage of any opportunity to wax his board and get in amongst them . He can throw his board on top of his car for a quick drive to the beach or if he feels like it he can even put it under his arm and walk there, it’s close enough. The waves here can be immense, up to forty feet high and only experienced surfers are skilled enough to take them on. But Sharkey – known as The Shark in these parts – has seen it all and done it all, he’s surfed all over the world and won many prestigious competitions, the waves hold no fear for him and they roll in biggest at Waimea Bay.

On this day we witness just how perfect his life can be. When he wakes he has uncomplicated sex with his live in lover, Olive, an English nurse he met some six weeks ago. When she’s departed for work he gathers fruit and eggs from his garden, feeds his chickens and admires the local flora and fauna before having a lazy breakfast and then he’s off to the beach. He surfs and swims and sleeps on the beach when he’s tired. In this way the whole day passes and as light dims he makes his way home.

We learn of his early life, his struggles as a non-native Hawaiian, a <i>haole</i>, resulting in some bullying at school and Joe’s regular escape to the beach as an alternative to attending lessons. His father was a forbidding military man, a Colonel who was seldom at home, and his mother someone who he struggled to find a bond with. But as a loner, a sea dog, he found his place amongst the waves. Later, when he’d become a ‘name’, he became friends with the legendary journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with whom he shared some bizarre episodes. He had no interest in what was going on in the wider world, saw no need to clutter his mind with extraneous knowledge. So in time his own world became a very simple one, he’d tell stories of his adventures, drink, smoke quite a bit of pakalolo, enjoy the company of women and most importantly he’d surf. But then it changed. An incident occurred and suddenly a rude interruption is introduced to this comfortable life.

It could be said that not much happens in this story, and to some extent that is true, except it misses the point that there is just so much texture to this book. It’s a deep exploration of one man: who he is, what made him that way, and a reminder that things that can come along to derail any human being. It’s about private thoughts and relationships and what makes people what they are. The comparison between Sharkey and his friend Hunter is an interesting one: they are very different people – Thompson wild and constantly seeking attention and Sharkey the quiet, storytelling loner – but more than that, it’s clear that the writer will leave his mark on the world, the indelible footprint of his work, whilst lacking video evidence of his achievements Joe’s actions are instantly erased.

Theroux’s writing had me entranced from the start. I believed in this man, I thought I understood him – I envied him. But then I was reminded that life is more complex than that, that people are more fragile, that the good times are not a permanent feature in anyone’s life. But then it’s about how we deal with the challenges that are thrown at us and who we have around us to lean on and who can support us. There are elements here that will, I think, frustrate some readers - they might find the surfing episodes somewhat repetitious, the regular use of Hawaiian words (often unexplained) frustrating and, late in the book, the lack of challenge to Sharkey in respect of his actions bemusing – but that’s for others to judge. For me, these were minor irritations in what I found to be a totally engrossing, thought provoking and an absolutely memorable reading experience.

It’s a chunky book and it took me a while to work through it and I found myself becoming more and more interested in the sheer excitement of surfing, to the extent I began watching online videos of surfers doing their thing at the spots featured in the book. And there’s a long-term goal that Sharkey regularly alludes to within the story, that of tracking down and surfing the largest wave of them all – the Big Mamma, a hundred foot monster. And in my internet surfing (excuse the pun) I came across the story of real life surfer Garrett McNamara who, it’s clear, is the inspiration for some of the action in this book. Garrett is actually featured in the narrative, but I’ll not spoil the fun by disclosing any more than that here.

A wonderful book, brilliantly written, and one that will undoubtedly live long in my memory.

Paul Theroux is a very prolific writer - mostly a travel writer. I’ve heard of him but never read his books until this one - Under The Wave at Waimea.

Wow it was good. Really tough to put down.

The story is about Joe Sharkey, accomplished big wave surfer who is past his prime. He’s in his 60s, never married, angry at the world, narcissistic. The book takes you through his life, how he became who he was and then leads to an incident in which Da Shark is forced to confront himself.

Set on a backdrop of Hawaii, Paul has a talent for bringing everything to life - the people, the scenery, the ocean, everything. It all seems so real.

My one not-as-positive feedback about this book is that it seems to be two novels put in one. About 75% (300 pages) into it, it seemed to me it could wrap up and effectively end the story. But, alas, the main incident happens and there is another 150 pages of that. It’s not bad, it didn’t lose my attention, it makes sense in that the three sections of the book are the Present, the Past and the Future. It was just surprising for me.

That aside, this book is great for anybody who loves literature and a good story. If you like Paul Auster (great writing, great stories, makes you think), you will love this Theroux book.

Now I’ve got to read some of his others.

#NetGalley #UnderTheWaveAtWaimea

Often I like books with unlikeable or unsympathetic characters, but this one just dragged for me. I think this wasn’t the right time for me to read this. Joe just couldn’t hook me enough to finish this book. A man 62 going on 16 doesn’t interest me.

When Joe Sharkey, surfing superstar, accidently kills a homeless man with his car he looks back on his life. Arriving in Hawaii at the age of 10 with his father, a special forces colonel stationed there during the Vietnam War, Sharkey remembers being bullied as a “haole.” He credits a native Hawaiian surfer for his survival. Becoming professional surfer, he travels the world. As he reminisces, his girlfriend and he travel to Arkansas and California to find out more about the man he killed. Theroux’s fans will find this book to be enjoyable as they are taken into the Hawaiian surf culture.