Book Review
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
By William Finnegan
Sometimes I get Jonathan Lethem’s mail. No, we don’t look alike. Rather, I live in an apartment in Brooklyn where he lived many years ago. Also, publishing companies don’t keep their mailing lists up-to-date.
When I rented the place, I hadn’t read any of his books. I borrowed “Motherless Brooklyn” and “Fortress of Solitude.” If you haven’t read them either, a key takeaway is: Lethem really, really likes Brooklyn. Both books take place around my block. He spends much of them nostalgic for how Brooklyn used to be, and rolling his eyes at how gentrified it’s becoming.
I feel partially responsible for this, as the software engineer who literally moved in to his place.
That same hypocritical mix of wistfulness and guilt socked me while reading “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.” This a 450-page autobiography about how William Finnegan really, really likes surfing. ” I have no interest in surfing. And yet I’m somehow nostalgic for surfing now?
Each chapter visits a particular beach at a period of Finnegan’s life, and that beach’s surfing culture. Long, detailed passages discuss the shape of waves. We spend the time unhurried, hanging out with local surfers. There’s not much overarching plot. Or driving suspense. Oh, as he gets older, he puts some technical thought into the ways he might drown. Yet no one would call it action-packed. This is not “Blue Crush.”
Part of the appeal is as travelogue. We get to hang out in Diamond Head Hawaii and Fiji and Bali Indonesia and Australia and apartheid-era South Africa and Ocean Beach San Francisco and Medeira Portugal and Long Beach New York. He ranges impressively far as a surf bum.
But with 450 pages and 60 years of meandering surfing, we gradually build a sense of perspective, a wide-angle view of change. We see Finnegan get old. Some of that is predictable in a get-off-my-lawn way. Shortboards go into fashion, then longboards go into fashion. At the beginning, he’s avidly reading surf magazines and looking up to local hero surfers. At the end, he’s bemoaning the way global fashion brands co-opt surf iconography, and tacky retail shops put surfboards on their walls.
I got to feel “in” on his righteous dismissal of kids taking a few afternoon surf classes then claiming they know how to surf. Those amateurs! They’re crowding the good waves! Even though — again — I still have zero interest in surfing.
The saddest part is what happens to Madeira. When he arrives, it’s a sleepy fishing village. Then the surfers discover its waves. Surf contests pop up. Soon, tourists are pouring in. The government starts pouring money on the place to make it the next big resort island, with infrastructure projects like sea walls and highways and tunnels.
Maybe I’m actively making surfing worse just by reading this book and telling you all about it.
