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[book post] Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn
"Whenever I've made a choice in my life, a real choice..." She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder just for a second. "I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach [...] I'm always losing better versions of myself," she says. "I don't know. You just have to keep trying."A rock-solid debut, and probably my favorite novel I've read since February. I can't wait to see more from this author.
The schtick: Nainoa Flores falls off a boat into shark-infested waters at age seven, and instead of getting chewed to bits, the sharks very gently pluck him up and bring him back to his family, unharmed.
In a conventional fantasy narrative, this would be the start of some Chosen One TM journey where he slowly learns the power of talking-to-sharks under the guidance of some wise mystical mentor or whatever. Except, this is set in modern-day fucked-up-by-colonialism Hawaii, so the biggest boon is the media sensation around the story, because Nainoa's parents have been in dire financial straits ever since the already-precarious sugarcane industry collapsed, and their multiple-jobs as bus drivers and convenience store cashiers and such sure don't amount to much, but the surge of donations from people fascinated by this shark story does.
Nainoa does end up having magic powers, of a sort, but they're much more precarious and subtle than you'd get in a straight fantasy story (think more magical realism, though I still don't think that's quite the right descriptor). Speaking of Nainoa: I was promised by
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helicoprion that he was a bit of a mopey up-his-own-ass fuckboi, and he definitely delivers compellingly on that front. Said fuckboi'ery + aforementioned dire financial straits are the perfect recipe for disaster—Nainoa's two siblings (asshole jock basketball guy Dean and smart-as-shit youngest-child-syndrome Kaui) end up resenting the shit of Nainoa, and the whole family develops Catastrophically Awful Coping Mechanisms, which means that even though all the siblings end up in wildly different corners of the west coast, they still can't shake all the baggage they've been building up and very determinedly ignoring. It took a while for this to be clear, but: fundamentally this is not a story about a Chosen One, really. It's about a family splintering apart and what happens afterwards.So, in other words, my shit.
The prose is a touch overwritten—not overwhelmingly so, just a whiff that's somewhere between "this man just finished a snooty MFA" and "this man wrote a lot of snooty fanfiction." (Maybe it's the scene structure, now that I think of it? The author does a thing with his scene structure that I've seen done in fanfiction I really like, but haven't seen done as much in published work, and it was honestly delightful to see someone pull it off in this context, if only because it means my gut-instinct approach to scene building isn't fundamentally unpublishable :P) The plot is a little thin, and yet there was something endlessly compelling that kept me turning pages—it's the voices of each of the characters that kept me going, I think, moreso than strength of story; I wanted to know each of them so much better, and never found myself trying to skip ahead to the next character's chapter, which is kind of impressive; normally that's the first thing I do in multiple-points-of-view stories.
The plot also makes a pretty bold decision halfway through, that I'm not sure entirely worked? But I'm not sure it failed, either; I'm still chewing it over. Certainly it took the story in a much different direction than I was expecting, a direction that I enjoyed by the end, even though I was so jarred by the whole thing. Like, without spoiling anything: the novel's penultimate bit pulls off a "guess we've got to talk because we've completely run out of ways to avoid each other" conversation that is so deeply earned and honest that it kind of floored me; the kind of thing that couldn't have happened in the story that I'd initially imagined, but worked so well here.
Which is why I'm so excited to see more by this author: I already like what's on the page, and I like the balance between "more experimental stuff" versus "stuff they've got down pat"; and thus, I want to see how they surprise me next time.
Finally, because I couldn't find anywhere else to put this: while obviously I love Kaui because how could you not, I gotta say (1) Dean's probably the most compelling and plausible jock-character-voice I've read in a long time, and (2) I was extremely amused by the author's deliberate obfuscation in never directly naming the university Dean attends, as though there is more than one university in Spokane, Washington with enough basketball prowess to make it to the Final Four of the NCAA tournament. Go bulldogs.
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I'm glad you liked this! I went in with no information, and basically no expectations because magical realism tends not to be my jam, but try anything once, right. And then. The drama. These incredibly interesting fuck-ups. Deffo looking forward to more from Washburn, dude's character writing kicks ass and the willingness to take risks is exciting.
The author does a thing with his scene structure that I've seen done in fanfiction I really like, but haven't seen done as much in published work
Could you elaborate on this? I definitely got online-fandom-adjacent vibes while reading, but it's been a couple months so I can't recall if I ever put my finger on why.
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A thing I’ve seen some multichapter fanfiction do lately is doing really big timeskips between chapters, such that each chapter has a very standalone mood/atmosphere/mini-arc. Like, let’s say you’re writing a postgame slowburn Claude/Lorenz fic (I’m not describing any particular fic here, just some plausible amalgamation):
Chapter 1: Claude PoV, with the two of them chatting right after the war ends.
Chapter 2: Lorenz PoV, an entire year later, while he’s sorting out some stupid internal politics stuff with his house, so we get a vivid portrait of the responsibilities/difficulties he’s facing, but there’s only a glancing mention of the letter from Claude that he hasn’t replied to.
Chapter 3: Hilda PoV, an “interlude” scene that feels a little bit like the author just wanted an excuse to have Hilda hang out for a bit, but does also fill in some gaps in our knowledge, in a sideways sort of way.
Chapter 4: Claude PoV, featuring his inevitable reunion with Lorenz at some diplomatic event a month later…
It’s easy to see why this structure would be appealing to fanfic authors: if they’re interested in a slowburn sort of dynamic between two characters, but don’t want to futz with the endless ramping-up-of-tension you’ve gotta do to make that plot structure work, this gets you there. The reader keeps reading, not because they’re like “oh my GOSH i cannot BELIEVE they have not KISSED yet they were SO CLOSE” at the end of each chapter, but because each chapter promises to illustrate some surprising new setting or dynamic that we haven’t seen the character in yet. It’s basically the longform, more sophisticated form of the “5-times-then-1” structure, lmao.
There’s a bunch of potential pitfalls with this approach, which is probably why I haven’t seen it much in mainstream genre literature—if the plot is actually the point, all these endless character moments may be just an annoyance. Or, if you don’t have enough dynamism or variety in your characters, you’ll just be hitting the same emotional beats over and over. Or, most likely, if you haven’t built enough connections or filled in enough gaps for these pseudo-standalone-scenes to make sense together, people are going to get confused why people are doing what they’re doing, or just plain not care enough about them.
But I think this novel’s a good example of how to pull this off. Even though we never see, e.g. Nainoa at Stanford, the shadow hangs heavy enough over the plot that it feels palpable and doesn’t really need to be fully spelled out. And what Dean/Nainoa/Kaui were up to was all sufficiently dynamic and distinct that I kept wanting to read. It’s a really cool effect!
(it’s entirely possible this is common in some other mainstream writing that i’ve just totally missed, lol, but fanfiction is where i know it from, so :P)
And, there was one other, more basic aspect that felt fanfiction-y to me: there are more sentence fragments than I think can be attributed solely to character voice, e.g. the “She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder for a second” in the excerpted bit above, instead of “She leans back from my head and touches my shoulder for just a second”… I’m neutral on this choice, as both styles read fine to me, but I definitely see the fragmented structure more often in web fiction than printed fiction.
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Chapter 1: Edelgard POV, early academy phase. She's trying to get into a good position before declaring war on literally everyone, so she's in Enbarr talking to one of her dad's peeps who'd be really useful to keep around/inconvenient to replace. But she loses control of the situation and dude might blow her whole plan so Hubert kills him.
Chapter 2: Seteth POV, same approximate timeframe, where he's investigating where all this unrest in the Eastern Church is coming from and also, why's Rhea being so cagey lately?
Chapter 3: Inexplicably it's six months later and Edelgard's the emperor now. What about that dude she had killed? What about Ferdinand's dad, what about Hubert's dad, what about any of the housecleaning and base-building she had to do to get here? Never mentioned. There's a bittersweet Edelgard/Dorothea scene and then Edelgard goes all Flame Emperor and fucks up the tomb.
You can get away with just hopping around between emotionally charged scenes in fanfic, if the canon has enough plot to build off of. You can just slot missing scenes into wherever they'd go, and not write any connective tissue because the canon already provides that and everyone knows what happened. In pro fic... it was baffling. There were just several rungs missing from this ladder for no reason! But this is the only time I've seen it (or seen it flubbed hard enough that I noticed) with something plotty so afaik you're right that this stays mostly in fanfiction-land. And (I say with all fondness for fanfiction) THERE MAY IT REMAIN.
I think Washburn manages to bring it off because the big emotional scenes are most of the plot, the characters have enough meat to them to sustain that attention, and what's happened in between chapters gets kinda backfilled by implication and suggestion. Take any of those things away and it'd probably feel a lot more disjointed.
The sentence fragments definitely are some type of weird artsy decision but I could not decide if that was some kind of MFA house style or what