People of the Whale: A Novel [Hardcover]

Linda Hogan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2008

A powerful story of a Vietnam veteran torn between his war experience and his Native American community.

Raised in a remote seaside village, Thomas Witka Just marries Ruth, his beloved since infancy. But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival. In the end, he reconciles his two existences, only to see tragedy befall the son he left behind.

Linda Hogan, called our most provocative Native American writer, with "her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic" (Barbara Kingsolver), has written a compassionate novel about the beauty of the natural world and the painful moral choices humans make in it. With a keen sense of the environment, spirituality, and the trauma of war, People of the Whale is a powerful novel for our times.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In telling a story of the fictional A'atsika, a Native people of the American West Coast who find their mythical origins in the whale and the octopus, Hogan (Mean Spirit) employs just the right touch of spiritualism in this engrossing tale. When Thomas Witka Just succumbs to peer pressure and joins the army, then is sent to Vietnam, Ruth Small is pregnant with his child. In an attempt to prevent an atrocity, Thomas kills fellow soldiers and deserts, ultimately blending into the Vietnamese culture and fathering a child, Lin, by Ma, a village girl. In the meantime, Ruth gives birth to their son, Marco Polo, who is said to have the same mystical whaling powers of Thomas's grandfather. Years later, following Thomas's return, Dwight, a ne'er-do-well friend of Thomas's, arranges for the tribe to kill a whale and to sell the meat to the Japanese, a plan that will draw in Marco Polo and set up a confrontation between the whole ensemble. Despite the plot's multiple strands, the story flows smoothly, and Hogan comes up with a powerful, romantic crescendo. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* “The ocean is a great being”; each whale is a planet, so much life does it sustain. These are truths Thomas and Ruth’s Northwest Pacific Coast tribe once held as self-evident. Sweethearts since childhood, they each inherited a working intimacy with the ocean, and their marriage is joyful until Thomas goes off to fight in Vietnam. Ruth is pregnant when he leaves, and when he doesn’t return, she devotes herself to their son, who possesses the old gift for communing with whales. Thomas reappears when his fellow Vietnam vets decide to break the ban on whale hunting, hoping to reclaim his legacy as the grandson of a legendary whale hunter. But the others are motivated by greed, and tribal traditions are grievously desecrated. Hogan, a poet, essayist, and quintessential econovelist (Power, 1998), dramatizes the interconnectivity of cultural extinction, environmental destruction, and war as she parallels Ruth’s courageous defense of the living world with Thomas’ suffering and secret life in Vietnam. She also links the near genocide of aboriginal peoples with the near extinction of marine life. Deeply ecological, original, and spellbinding, Hogan ascends to an even higher plane in this hauntingly beautiful novel of the hidden dimensions of life, and all that is now imperiled. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition/First Printing edition (August 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393064573
• ISBN-13: 978-0393064575
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,175,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deeply Moving, August 25, 2008

By 

Buecherwurm "Saskia" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: People of the Whale: A Novel (Hardcover)

In her quiet, intensive, often lyrical writing, Linda Hogan has created a serious and magical book. In the story of one Native man's search for his place in the Native and the American world, in tribal tradition and modern day problems, she speaks to all of us. What is the source of our greed and desparation, that leads this man, Thomas Just, to going to the Vietnam War, or leads his tribal members to restart whale hunting outside of international treaties and their own traditions? We get more insight into men suffering from war than many fictional and non-fiction titles about war can provide - we see with empathy.

A moving book with strong female characters, especially Thomas' wife Ruth, and wise elders, it also opens our heart and mind to the ocean and the survival struggle of all its creatures, especially the mysterious octopuses and whales.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "They were such a sight for him to behold, the man who lived between the worlds and between the elements.", July 31, 2008

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: People of the Whale: A Novel (Hardcover)

When Thomas W Just is born in 1947, he is beloved by his people, Native Americans who live on the northern West Coast of the Pacific, people whose lore is of song and memory, of whales given from the sea that the people may survive. Much like his wise grandfather, Thomas is of the sea and its creatures, living in harmony with the old ways. He marries his childhood sweetheart, Ruth, only to be separated after one foolish night of drinking, when Thomas signs up for the army. When he leaves, Ruth is carrying their son. In Vietnam, Thomas is tormented by the horrors, conflicted, finding solace among the surviving remnants of destruction, a nascent life force resisting annihilation by chemical and fire. Thomas is absorbed into the community of civilians: "On the ground, in the sky, everything would kill you." The war breaks his spirit and silences the voices he has heard all his life, the roots of his identity, the ancestors, Ruth, his place in the world.

But life is not easily defeated in such a man, filled with profound respect for nature and renewal; Thomas reverts to solitude and silence, working beside the villagers, one of them until the army, thinking to retrieve him, drags him away from his new life, from Ma and their daughter, Lin. Back in the states, Thomas cannot find his way home, his spirit absent, hollow. By the time he returns to his grandfather's empty place on the black rocks, the world has passed him by, insignificant. Now the story is about Ruth, the patient, wise woman who has loved Thomas all her life, has raised their son only to have fate steal him away, one more tragedy she bears with stoic endurance, bred to understand her people and their history. And the story is about Lin, who survives Vietnam without mother or father, who builds a life from nothing, the memory of her father enshrined in her heart, giving her courage. It is Lin, a young married woman, who finds Thomas, trapped so long in the shadows of his troubled soul. Lin, the repository of loss and hope, is delivered finally to Thomas by Ruth. What bitterness could there be for those who have known such losses?

Hogan transcends place and culture, weaving together the frail threads of damaged people, humanizing, making whole that which has been brutalized, marrying past to present. Whether inside the tribal beliefs of the People of the Whale or the patched-together culture of Ho Chi Min city, new lives are recreated from remnants of the old, the human spirit shining brightly from the pages, indomitable against greed and rancor, the lexicon of war. The journey is extraordinary, two worlds brought seamlessly together, two cultures steeped in pain, suffering and annihilation, ever renewed when those of vision refuse to surrender the past to a more profane present. This is not a story one leaves willingly, these characters, Thomas, Ruth and Lin, familiar as our better selves, we who wander so easily from our ties to the earth, tenuous though they have become. Such writing is soul-healing, reminding us that ancestors hold the wisdom of the people, stringing one generation to another with song, story and memory, no matter the geography of identity. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Linda Hogan disappointed me for the first time., August 2, 2009

By 

sbmes - See all my reviews

This review is from: People of the Whale: A Novel (Paperback)

I LOVE all of Linda Hogan's other books. She is my favorite author. I love her so much that I won't even let my bookclub select any of her books as one of our monthly picks, lest one of our members besmirch her name in some way or offer a criticism of her. However, I'm very disappointed in People of the Whale. The premise of the story is great, but I think she does a poor job of telling it. The writing seems lazy and careless to me, almost like she didn't care much about doing a good job. "There was heated water for him in the winter when the old women filled a tub for him with heated containers of water." Other times it just seems sloppy to me, as when she mistakenly writes "Randall" when the character's name is Russell.

If I had read "Whale" first I wouldn't have read anything else she wrote. I wouldn't recommend it -