A High and Beautiful Wave / A High and Beautiful Wave

John Wythe White

Mutual Publishing, 2008, 320 pages, $l4.95

Hawai’i is an inexhaustible source for stories of every sort, but that does not mean it is easy to write about it well–that is, truthfully and beautifully. John Wythe White’s novel, with its metaphorical title, its eye for the telling detail and its absolutely superb descriptions of surfing and the ocean, does just that. Its protagonist, a seeker whose peregrinations–from California to Europe to (and mostly in) Hawai’i–might conveniently be called Hippie-esque, is a man capable of discernment and real reflection, an imperfect man (in the best sense of the term), whose experiences involving love and sex and learning about the natural world are both rich and devastating.

If Oakley is the main character, as we follow him for more than 30 years, the other main character is Time–relentless time, surging forward, affecting everyone and everything, and leaving danger-filled detritus–and happening not only to the characters in a time-haunted novel but to the novel’s readers as well. We meet Oakley not at his life’s apogee (the 1970s in Kaua’i) but in its decline, when he is a 56-year-old teacher, somewhat disillusioned, in 2001, as it is clear that the new century is not what anyone would have wished but what everyone has inherited.

A serendipitous Internet connection, as spied upon by one of his students, has featured a picture of Oakley taken in 1970, with a bunch of bananas in hand, the very picture of the “we’ve got to get back to the garden” innocence. This occasion’s a flashback to that very time. A second communication, an e-mail, indicates that the person who stole his camera in 1970 wants to return it–and to Oakley in person, offering him a round-trip flight to 2001 Kaua’i. This to a man who has just pronounced his life as “turned to shit.”

Thus does his novel, ingenious in its compression, take us to various times in Oakley’s life–1962-1966, 1967, but mostly 1970 and 2001–and various states of mind and mood, various expectations and realities, and a cascade of characters: a Zen master, several lovers, dropouts and draft dodgers, surfers and charlatans. We see acid freaks, junkies and free-lovers, some in the famous Taylor Camp enclave, where those who came of age in the 1960s seek and find, seek and do not find, trapped in time and mesmerized by the gorgeous, unceasing ocean.

If you remember the ’60s, they used to say, then you weren’t really there. Luckily, Hawai’i, usually 10 years behind the curve, had its ’60s in the ’70s–and so Oakley remembers all. Some memories are snap-shot size; some are far more detailed and emotive, some funny, some treasured by a remembering Oakley, some smartly satirized.

There are two sections in some Hawai’i bookstores: “fiction” and, oddly enough, “literature.” This novel, by White, will belong–does belong–in the literature section.

But let’s have the surfing Oakley have the last words: “He points his board toward shore and feels the wave take over. He stands, turning into the curling crest, crouching as it surrounds him with whirling silver glass.”

Dead Downwind

Bill Riddle

Compass Rose Press
523 pages, $26.50

Bill Riddle’s exhaustively-researched, splendidly-illustrated historical novel loglines itself, “ten harrowing days that changed aviation history,” but it is much more than that, and therein lies some rub. The year is 1924, three years before Lindbergh will fly the Atlantic, and the 10 days are those in which three planes attempt to fly nonstop from San Francisco to Honolulu. What happens to those three planes, and, in particular, to the biplane commanded by Hawai’i-based John Rodgers, in 1925, is the central story, and a suspenseful one, but it is a long haul before Riddle’s book enters that story proper.

We first meet Cmdr. Rodgers, whom this book calls “one of the greatest heroes of 20th century Hawai’i,” when he learns of the planned next-year’s flight, 2,400 miles as assigned by Rear Admiral William Moffett. While Rodgers and his crew prepare for the flight, his marriage collapses, his love affair with the enchanting Akiko commences, and Rodgers tries to hide from everyone that his eyesight is deteriorating. The flight itself does not occur until nearly halfway into the 523 page book, which is too bad, for that’s when the book takes off and becomes genuinely gripping…and moving.

The book is a must for aviation/military history buffs but iffy for casual general readers.

The great numbers of photos reproduced therein are impressive, as is Riddle’s research, which appears thoroughly meticulous. Here’s a book with a good deal of Hawai’i in it, as written by a long-time Hawai’i resident.

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