The Whale Chaser by Tony Ardizzone

First published in 2010; published by Chicago Review Press on May 1, 2015

Vince Sansone lives in Tofino, a fishing village near Vancouver. It is 1974 and Vince has lived in Canada for seven years, having left behind a less than idyllic life in America. Vince's father was a fish monger and Vince, despite his intense need to rebel against his childhood, is gutting fish for a living. Fortunately, his thoughts are frequently diverted by drugs and sex and his career eventually follows a different path.

Like many guys (especially those who alphabetize their jazz albums), Vince has a knack for picking women who leave him. He is befriended by a Native named Ignatius who has a Catholic education like his own, giving Tony Ardizzone a primary vehicle for discussions of philosophy and human nature. Ignatius and other characters are more widely read than Vince, who spends many of his self-pitying moments drinking beer, smoking weed, and feeling stupid.

In alternating sections of the novel we see Vince's childhood in Chicago, where nuns taught him how to bear the suffering inflicted by his father and the world in general. He tells a typical but occasionally engaging story of life in an ethnic (Italian) neighborhood where people maintain closer ties to the old country than to their current home. He spends his time fretting about girls, wondering whether he should become a butcher, and fretting about the butcher's daughter when he's not fretting about a different girl. He also describes sex in tedious detail (it is quite an accomplishment to make me view descriptions of sex as tedious). Much of the Chicago story (and even the Canada story) is "boy meets girls, boy loses girls, boy wallows in self-pity until he meets more girls." It is well written but unoriginal.

Many of the events that Vince describes are probably of greater interest to Vince than they were to me, although the ill-treatment of Italians in Monterey during World War II (one of many factors that might contribute to Vince's father's anger) is one of the novel's strong points. The Whale Chaser also makes it clear that there are more people in the world than those we encounter in our own tiny existence and that all those people have value equal to our own even if we never think about them.

It takes some time for the story to reach the dramatic moment (Chicago 1967) that explains why Vince moved to Canada. By that time, I had trouble caring. In any event, Vince's coming-of-age moment, like the rest of the Chicago story, is unoriginal. His second coming of age (or coming to maturity) moment (Canada 1980) is hokey.

At some point young Vince discusses Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of stories about characters who (depending on your perspective) have no choice about their fates or make unhappy choices or lack the courage to make choices that might make them happy. That seems to be the point of The Whale Chaser. Vince makes a choice or he responds to events in his life in the only way he can or he simply lacks the courage to face the reality of his life. I liked some of the book, primarily the Canadian setting and the prose, but nothing in the story generated a strong emotional impact. On the whole, I can only give this novel a guarded recommendation, more for its prose than for its intermittently intriguing content.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS