Customer Reviews

People of the Whale: A Novel

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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.

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.

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 -

A very moving story creating understanding of Native American's lives and struggles in today's culture. Linda Hogan is a passionate and moving author and a voice that captures the complexities of being a woman like no other author I know! If you want to read about powerful women, read all of her books.

This is such a beautifully written book; descriptive, intriguing, engrossing. I actually read it first from the library, then I had to buy it for my own collection for the pleasure of rereading it whenever I want!

I highly recommend it! I'm definitely reading more from this author.

Some books are meant to be devoured. A great mystery, for example, or a romance where you can't wait to see if the star-crossed lovers ends up together or not.

Other books are meant to be savored. People of the Whale by Linda Hogan falls into this latter category, and savor it I did, like a fine wine.
When Thomas Witka Just marries his childhood sweetheart, Ruth, they are sure their love will last until the last gray whale sings its final song. They are members of the (fictional) A'atsika tribe, a West Coast tribe that holds the whale sacred, who believe they are descended from the whale.

But the old ways are dying. When Thomas succumbs to peer pressure to enlist, he goes off to fight in Vietnam without really understanding what, exactly, he is getting into. The horrors of war and wonton killing of women and children get to be too much for him; he kills soldiers from his own platoon and slips off into the Vietnamese jungle, leaving his dog tags behind so he will be presumed dead. He blends in with the native people and makes a living growing rice. Eventually, he fathers a daughter, Lin, there.

Back home, Ruth has given birth to Thomas's son, Marco Polo Just. Marco becomes the hope of his people as he grows. He seems to have an intuitive relationship with the octopus and the whale, and as he grows, he is taken to the island of elders to be trained in the Old Ways.

When men from the tribe decide they should kill a whale, Ruth is horrified. Where are the old ways? Where are the purification rituals, the songs, the prayers, that were to be performed before the hunt? Where is the respect for their ancestor, the whale?

Thomas returns just in time for the hunt. Barely acknowledging his son, Marco, they both board the whaling boat, and soon a young whale is spotted. Then tragedy strikes, and what becomes of both Ruth, Thomas, at the A'atsika is destined to be changed forever.

With Hogan's poetic prose and acute understanding of native peoples and the sea, one cannot help but see her parallels between the near extinction of the whale, indigenous peoples, and the slaughter of innocents in Vietnam. In Thomas's search for redemption after the bungled whale hunt, and Ruth's search for the salvation of herself and her people, it is difficult not feel compassion for people whose way of life has been all but wiped out by greed and pressure to give up traditional ways.

People of the Whale is an apropos tale for our time. It encourages the reader to view the world with a more spiritual set of eyes, to respect the balance of nature and our role in it. As I write this review, I recall an interview I read this morning with a Florida Tea Party member, voicing her disapproval of protecting Florida's endangered manatees. :We cannot elevate nature above people," she said. "That's against the Bible and the Bill or Rights."

Nowhere in the Bill of Rights do I find a word giving humankind the right to destroy nature. And if I recall my biblical studies correctly, God first made the Garden of Eden. Humankind was an afterthought to nature.

We are not above nature. We are part of nature. We all are people of the whale, the bear, the tiger, the snake. People of the Whale is a beautiful, gentle reminder of this.

If only we could get the Tea Party to read it!

Written to illustrate a specific cultural context, Linda Hogan's People of the Whale transcends the Native American experience and addresses the universal human struggle to achieve redemption and completeness in a world that seeks to fracture communities, nations, and individuals. Set amongst the A'atsika, an ocean tribal people, who live on the Pacific Northwest Coast of the North American continent, Hogan tells a story that is filled with endangered ancestral wisdom, sacred songs and rituals. Focusing on the divide between the old and the new ways, People of the Whale encompasses elements which are philosophically intrinsic to a perceived natural order of the cosmos. Telluric in nature, one might argue, to a certain degree, that it expresses an inherent sense of existential quest as to whether man is a mere component or an active agent within such sphere. Hogan consistently suggests that one's choices will lead to consequences which, in turn, will lead to a greater array of choices, a consistent indication which effectively suggests one has an intrinsically active role as an agent of their own self.

The shipping was quick and this book was listed as a fair used book and so I was not holding my breath about what kind of condition the book would be in when I got it. I was happy to see that the book had little wear and it was in good condition.
I am very pleased with this book store.
Thank you,
Student Lisa

In the acknowledgments at the end of the novel, Hogan thanks her husband, "who talked with me about Viet Nam back before my accident." She then says, "I apologize for forgetting names." While reading this novel with my International Lit class, several students noticed the Russell/Randall error, as did I. Maybe Hogan's editor at Norton was so lazy and inept as to not catch this obvious miscue; ditto, presumably, various friends who read the draft, common practice for writers nowadays, even given she was recovering from a head injury and had the presence of mind to offer a preemptive apology for mixing up names.

Add to this the fact that, same as for many (arguably most) Native American and other indigenous writers, Hogan's main theme is discontinuity of memory following the rupture of colonization and its subsequent, arguably still unhealed trauma, notably including the severing of a sacred relationship between a human culture and its non-human cohabitants.

What better way to make the trope of recovery-of-memory real than for a tribal author to tell a commanding story about this theme, while overtly and graphically confessing to the very flaw she places at the core of our current ecological crisis, likewise contemporary tribal "forgetting" of traditional culture and its values? So yes, I bet any college kid getting paid minimum wage to find the mistakes could have fixed that one, ditto the erstwhile howler wherein a fishing boat named the Marco Polo becomes "Marco Pollo" (Mark the Chicken, in Spanish). Maybe Hogan did have a crap editor, and lazy friends, but I doubt it. Amongst the tens of thousands of "creative writers" currently bearing their souls to no one, Hogan has earned her audience, and has taken a leap that would until recently have been called postmodern, letting the seams show in what otherwise would be a mimetically convincing but ultimately less real and less powerful rendering of a story told by someone who has the misfortune--or maybe the blessing--of being touched by the gods, via a fall to earth.