Richard Price

I just finished “Barbarian Days: A Surfer’s Life”, by William Finnegan. It is hot tub prose. Once you are in it, you don’t want to get out. The prose is beautiful. The book is a memoir, written by a New Yorker journalist, William Finnegan. The backdrop of the book is surfing, and Finnegan’s passion for it. The book is also about people: the various people Finnegan surfs with throughout his life, and also Finnegan himself. The book charts the development of Finnegan’s character and personality over time. The magic of the book is that Finnegan is about to take fairly ordinary situations, and make them captivating to read. Finnegan can write about traveling around Australia, and getting a job as a pot-washer in a restaurant, and make it captivating. He can write about camping on a beach, and make it captivating. I was thinking about how Finnegan achieves this magic. It is partly about detail. The events in the book are remembered with remarkable detail, making it feel like you are transported to the time and place that Finnegan is writing about. Finnegan has been writing in his journal all his life, and writing regular correspondence to friends. He says at the beginning of the book that the correspondence was returned to him before he started writing the book. Finnegan’s magic lies partly in his writing about people. Finnegan is an astute observer of people. You get to know the characters he writes about. Their stories, lives, and motivations are woven together with the events of the book. The writing is beautiful to read. I thought of it as “hot tub prose”: once you get in, you don’t want to get out.