Book Review: Barbarian Days

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Lifeby William FinneganPenguin Press, 2015New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan has a new complication in his career, a kind of complication that happens to New Yorker staff writers more often statistically than it does to pipe fitters or Comcast customer service agents: he's now the author of a hit book. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, out now in hardcover from Penguin Press with a hideous biscuit-beige cover and trailing the kinds of hosannas of praise that seldom attach themselves to works of nonfiction, even works hep and cool enough to be about surfing.The book fully deserves all the praise it's reaped in the last month, and that's at least partially due to the fact that Barbarian Days is actually about quite a bit more than surfing. Finnegan moves to the southern side of Hawaii's Diamond Head as a boy when his father takes a job producing a local Hawaiian radio show in 1966, although Finnegan himself was already by that point bitten by the surfing bug, collecting surfing magazines and testing out his rudimentary form in the California surf. He was soon to pass his classroom hours “slouched in back rows, keeping an eye on the trees outside for signs of wind direction and strength, drawing page after page of surfboards and waves,” and the first thing he does upon his family's arrival, even while his parents and siblings are unpacking, is head down the lane to “the Cliffs,” the surfing break near his new home, where he has his first encounter with the natives:

There was a lot of talk and laughter among the other surfers. Eavesdropping, I couldn't understand a word. They were probably speaking pidgin. I had read about pidgin in James Michener's Hawaii but, with my debut at Kaimuki Intermediate still a day away, hadn't actually heard any yet. Or maybe it was some foreign language. I was the only haole (another word from Michener) in the water. At one point, an older guy paddling past me gestured seaward and said, “Outside.” It was the only word spoken to me that day. And he was right: an outside set was approaching, the biggest of the afternoon, and I was grateful to have been warned.

Finnegan's memoir expands generously on his family life, but the bulk of the book is devoted to his far-ranging travels all around the world chasing waves, and it's the lunatic activity of surfing - in which an individual positions himself on a long board in such a way as to resemble almost exactly a seal when seen from below … then paddles out past the surf breaks and swells, into the threshold of deeper water where several species of shark routinely hunt for seals – that evokes Finnegan's most memorable prose:

Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were you adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile witness – a dynamic, indifferent world. At thirteen, I had mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development, and it had left a hole in my world, a feeling that I'd been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.

In the decades since young William Finnegan first fell in love with the sport, surfing has become a multimillion-dollar big business, with an international allure that's inspired many dozens of memoirs, some boring, some treacly, far too many lost in a fog of hippy bragging. In that strange, wistful sub-genre, Barbarian Days stands out as a landmark of eloquence and energy. The New Yorker will doubtless by tendering the author a generous raise, if they're smart.