Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: A Life Worthy of Whalefall

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

What does it mean to live a life worthy of those we leave behind? On this episode of The Sunday Story, Ayesha Rascoe explores the idea with author Daniel Kraus. Kraus' latest novel is Whalefall. It tells the story of Jay Gardiner, a troubled young man burdened by guilt after the death of his estranged father. Jay hopes to redeem himself by diving to recover his father's remains in the ocean off the California coast; instead he is swallowed whole by a whale. It is in the whale's dark belly that Jay finally begins to reconcile with his father and understand the lessons he'd been trying to pass on. The book is not just a page-turning thriller but a deep meditation on fathers, sons and loss.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. So, I love horror fiction. It's my favorite genre. Anything with monsters or zombies or dead people coming back to life, I'm into it. I also love a good thriller. So, Daniel Krauss had been on my radar for a while. He's a New York Times bestselling author who has written some pretty scary books. When I heard he had a book coming out this summer called Whale Fall, I was intrigued. You know, I'm like, what is this going to be about?

This book is, it's not necessarily horror, although the situation is horrific, but it's definitely a thriller. If I wanted to sum it up, I would say it's about a scuba diver who is swallowed by a whale and he has to figure out how to escape before his oxygen runs out. That over the top premise was more than enough to draw me in. But when you actually read the book, it's really about so much more. It's about a father and a son and the legacies fathers leave behind. It's about what we carry with us and what we let go. When I talked to Daniel Krause back in August, just as the book was coming out, I got a sense of how significant this book was to him. A whale fall in nature is a death of an incredible creature, a whale.

But then that death provides for many other life forms and it is a huge event in the ocean. Daniel was wrestling with what it means to have a meaningful life and a meaningful death, a whale fall. His sister was dying and he spoke openly about that. Since our interview, she has passed away and I offer my deepest condolences to him and his family. This conversation has stayed with me. What does it mean to live a life that is worthy of a whale fall? What does it mean to live a life that is years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad.

From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. Daniel Krause is the author of Whale Fall and joins us now. Welcome to the program. Hey, thanks for having me. So a whale fall isn't just when a whale dies and the carcass sinks. It's when the carcass sinks, it's when the carcass sinks deep. What makes the depth of the fall so special or special enough

to be the title of this book? Yeah, well, I mean, the book is really about death in a lot of ways. I mean, the story begins with the diver's father already dead. And the idea of a whale fall, which as you said, is a giant whale who sinks to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean and the corpse lands and it dies. Yeah, in a way, it's simple, it dies. But what it really does is it creates life and it creates centuries worth of life because of its decomposition. And I thought it was kind of a beautiful metaphor for what the book is about in that there are good deaths and

there's bad deaths. And the best death of all, I think, is when you can die and your death means something to others, whether that's you're passing along something biological, you've got a family, you're leaving behind art. In my case, maybe it's books. Or you've just touched people in some way. The best death for all of us is for us to become whale falls. And I mean, this book definitely, I mean, when you think about it, it's, you know, it's about a person being swallowed by a whale, but it's about so much more than that. I have to ask you about the pace because what I found was some of it, like some of the chapters are super short. They're just like a sentence. And like they flash back and forth in time. To me, it's almost like there's like a frenetic pace to it. It's definitely a thriller. Like how did you go about feel like gasps for air and i wanted the reader

to constantly be aware of how much air he's losing you know the chapter headings are all essentially telling you how much oxygen he has left so with the short chapters you're constantly gasping and constantly having to to sink them back down to the drama and it alternates between what's going on inside the whale and in these flashbacks and really that came not from me having some brilliant idea about how to structure it but came from the reality of what the diver was going through and how when you're in these kind of situations as a diver, well, not many divers can be in this particular situation, but any kind of stressful situation. Yeah, a couple. But a stressful situation as a diver means more importantly than even ever before is you need to breathe sleepy as the character says

in the book you need to modulate your breathing uh and so the book emulates trying to control panic with the size of its chapters and that's what it feels like i mean it feels like you are um like like you're having these half thoughts or trains of thoughts, so you're jumping here and there. Like, you know, it's a brain that's like firing all sorts of things at itself because it's in this very dire situation. So including having flashbacks of the life that you lived. lived um one thing that the main character in this story jay that he has is that he um he has this wealth of knowledge about diving and about sea creatures that he got from his father who has a very difficult relationship with but like this book is full of information. Like, are you a diver yourself? How did you, how did you learn all of this? Well, I grew up in Iowa. So you won't dive

in. There's not a lot of, there's not a lot of oceans in Iowa. There's some sort of gross lakes. No, this is, this book really is the opposite of the old adage right what you know i knew absolutely nothing about whales i knew nothing about diving knew very little about the ocean so i was starting with nothing you know like usually when i start a book i've got an idea of a plot and then i'll kind of research to kind of fill in the gaps. But with this, there are no books about this. So I had to front load the process with about three months of intense interviews with whale scientists and diving experts.

And during that process, I was sort of like the diver inside the whale, and I was shining a flashlight at this part of the stomach and saying, what is this? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? What's over here? What happens if I tug on this? And it was like taking a college class in advanced whales, I guess. Internal.

Just learning. Yeah, yeah. Advanced internal whales was the class I took. And I had to really learn inch by inch and second by second what happens inside of a whale to even begin to even understand what kind of plot I could have. Because it was important to me that the book be 100% scientifically accurate. You know, getting to the, I guess, the heart of the book, the stomach of the book, the intestines of the book. You know, Jay, he gets swallowed by a giant sperm whale. That's not giving anything away. But while he's in the whale, he's alive.

He's thinking about his father, Mitt, and his regrets. Talk to us about this relationship with his dad and really how often, I would say, it could be male, but I guess it doesn't have to be gender, how that relationship with the parent can weigh someone down in such an incredible way. Yeah. Well, you know, when I came up with the premise of the book, it immediately struck me as something really like primeval almost and powerful in that way. Like it reminds us, I think, of when we used to be in some primordial part of our brain, beings that had to worry about being swallowed, that had to worry about being eaten.

And centuries of domination have sort of made that fear go dormant, but it's still there. And for that reason, I think the premise has a power, a simple power. And so I wanted to pair that with a relationship that also wasn't overly complicated. I wanted it to be something that was simple and everyone could understand. And the simplest relationship is the first one we have, which is child and parent. Yes, Jay and his father have a troubled relationship. You know, Mitt was a man of the sea, a local diving legend, but also the kind of guy who couldn't hold down a job and felt sort of emasculated by his domestic life

and just wanted to be out in the sea. And he wanted to mold Jay in his image. And Jay didn't want that. And so he was sort of kicking and screaming, drug along to all these diving exploits. And they ultimately, through some terrible things that the father did, became estranged. And so Jay leaves home for a year,

and that's when Mitt gets cancer and dies, and Jay never sees him, never visits him on his deathbed. So when Jay is swallowed, he begins, you know, under the influence of the methane in the whale's stomach and the injury and the panic, begins to conflate the whale with his father, almost as if the whale is his father. So the book becomes one of reconciliation, that the father and the son have to sort of reconcile

their regrets of how they treated each other if Jay has any chance of getting out, because the dad was the keeper of all the knowledge. And he told that knowledge. He gave that knowledge to Jay, but Jay purposely tried to forget it as kind of a screw you to his dad. And now he's got to make amends if he's going to survive.

What do you think about that? Because, you know, the relationship between a parent and a child, like in a way, you know, when you think about the whale, like a parent can almost swallow a child whole in the sense that your whole life, right, can be whether you are running away from who the parent was, whether you're trying to live up to what the parent wanted you to be, you can be consumed by who your parents were and what they did and did not do. And so I guess when you talk about reconciliation,

what do you see that as? Because it does seem like Jay does seem to come to the realization there were good moments with his father, but there were a lot of bad moments with his father. Does reconciliation mean forgiveness? Does it mean letting go? Does it mean accepting? I don't think it necessarily has to mean any of those things.

The book is divided into two sections, and those sections are drawn from my reading of the book of Jonah. And those sections are titled Truth and Mercy. Yeah. So truth, I mean, there are truths. There are the facts of what Jay did to Mitt and what Mitt did to Jay. And I'm not saying they're equal. You know, I think Mitt was worse we've all been part of ugly truths. And can we, when the chips are down, and particularly when life is ending, can we show mercy?

It's a complicated, thorny issue. And I don't think it ever fully gets resolved. And I don't, but how could I resolve it? You know, it's been an issue since the beginning of time. Yeah. You bring up the book of Jonah because obviously when people hear about a man or a young man being swallowed by a whale, they think of, you know, Jonah in the Bible who gets swallowed by a whale. If I recall my Bible stories correctly, Jonah was supposed to do something for the Lord told him to do something, he refused. He tried to run away. Then he got swallowed by a whale. He gets inside the whale. He prays, he repents, and then he spat out and he goes and

does what the Lord wanted him to do. Is that a correct reading of that? Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean, you know, we're about at the same level. I write a lot about, even though I'm not a religious person, I write a lot about religion. It fascinates me. And I find it just a really interesting topic. So much of human society is built upon it. So, you know, when you write a book like this, you have to be aware of the touchstones people are going to have.

Yeah, Moby Dick. I knew people would think of Jonah. Yeah. I knew people would think of Moby Dick, right. So those things are sort of have. Yeah. Moby Dick. I knew people would think of Jonah. Yeah. I knew people would think of Moby Dick. Right. So those things are sort of on the table. So why not use them? Okay.

No one has to understand Jonah to read this book. It's not required whatsoever. But to me, Book of Jonah was about second chances. And it was about this quality of truth versus mercy. And sort of more importantly, I really, you know, this whale is not Jaws. You know, the whale in the book is not nefarious. It's not a man-eater. Whales would never purposely eat a human. The whale, as I envisioned it, was something very benevolent and in fact, kind of godlike. Sperm whales are so interesting because they're mammals.

They will dive down 10,000 feet deep and yet they have to keep coming up, the whales, to breathe. And I kept on seeing that visual of them going from the abyssal deep to the surface as almost like an elevator between worlds. And almost, you know, for Mitt, the ocean is heaven and the whales are sort of angels. And so when the whale sort of becomes Mitt, it starts a whole new cycle of sort of spiritual spiritualism in the book even though mit himself was professed to be very anti-religious but he had religion his religion was the ocean his spiritualism was the ocean um and you know he says in the book what we're all looking for whether it's from god or book, what we're all looking for, whether it's from God or from nature, what we're all searching for are moments of awe.

We're all trying to find this feeling of being small. And sort of counterintuitively, by feeling small, it allows you to recognize the existence of something big. And that's essentially religion in a way. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. We're back with The Sunday Story. We're listening to a conversation I had with Daniel Krause about his new book, Whale Fall. This is all about fathers and sons. Did you draw from your own personal relationship with your father for this story or from, you know, your relationship with your parents or a family member? Well, I mean, I would not say that my father is like Mitt, but there are

some similarities. My dad is a big hunter, you know, and it's not something I ever took to. So there's a seed of it there for sure. It was more that I was drawing from things happening around me at the time. I'm 48. I'm at that age where people I know are starting to die. Just in the last few months, I've had a good friend die, and my father-in-law died, and my sister is dying right now. Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry.

She has very little time left to live. And this book, To Our Mon, I'm sort of doing in her honor. And that made me think about whale fall. It made me think about what a good death is. And those sort of ideas collided with the basic high concept idea of being swallowed by a whale. And being swallowed by, whether it's your parents or the life that you've lived and the regrets that you have.

And being in this moment, whether that's slowly dying in a bed or dying inside the belly of a whale, you are at this moment. There comes a time where there's nowhere else to turn, and we have to look into ourselves and determine, have we lived a good life? Have we lived a life worthy of whale fall? These are all mixed up, and I like that in a way.

I like that these ideas get kind of jumbled up inside of a thriller narrative. Because I think it deepens it and it complicates it. And I think when people read this book, what they're expecting is a real-time breakneck thriller. And it is that. I think what they're not expecting is how moving it's going to be. I've had so many reactions where people tell me they read the book and they loved it, but they didn't expect to be crying by the end of it. And that was the risk and the appeal for me of writing the book,

to try to see if I could do all that at once. You know, we don't want to spoil the ending, so I'll let you answer directly however you feel. But Jay starts this entire adventure, he's searching for the literal bones of his father. But obviously, that can be a metaphor for guilt, for the past, for being weighed down, for the responsibilities that people have. There's that great question in the book about what responsibilities do sons have to their fathers. Do you think that there's a way that you can allow the past to stay the past or that what is buried should stay buried? That sometimes we're going looking for closure, as Jay kept, you know,

kind of saying in air quotes, and that's not there, that doesn't exist. Yeah, I mean, everyone's going to feel different about this and answer it in a different way. But yeah, I do think sometimes closure is not possible. And that the only other option is the opposite, sort of opening and just being open to everything, to all the feelings, all the emotions. You're right that Jay was out looking for his father's remains, but what he sort of realized at some point is that the search was silly in a way. It was pointless. He is his father's to accept who we are, our faults, our regrets, and having the courage to stare them in the face.

And that happens to a lot of us when we're at the end of our lives, I think. But it's maybe healthier and a good practice to do that a little bit while we're still up and kicking. Daniel Krause's new book is Whale Fall. Thank you for joining us. Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Ryan Bink and Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Ed McNulty and Jenny Schmidt. Our team includes Liana Simstrom, Justine Yan, and Irene Noguchi is our executive

producer. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at thesundaystoryatnpr.org. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week until then have a great rest of your weekend