Every Boat Turns South

Review by David L. Danielson for Every Boat Turns South
Rating:
Every Boat Turns South

J. P. White

Review- Dave Danielson

A poet writes a first novel. That may be newsworthy but it ought not to be. A teacher once said, “No one should attempt a novel until they have written poetry.” J.P. White has learned to turn a phrase as well as tack into the wind in a Bermuda ’40 “any sailor’s wet dream.” It’s first rate entertainment, a good enough reason for reading.

That is not to say that it is not literary which is another reason for reading like eating lima beans, `because they’re good for you.’ It’s not altogether impossible, as White has shown, to create a book that is both literary and entertaining, but it is a delicate balance.

Writing is above all a dialogue, because words are essentially worthless. They are merely symbols representing reality; they are not themselves reality. If words are not vehicles of conveyance between writer (speaker) and reader (hearer) they are no more than blowing in the wind. Words are used to excite an image in a reader’s brain. If there is no image in the brain even remotely related to the word trigger, nothing happens except maybe inducing sleep.

That’s what many poets do to me. They know things I don’t know, and if they’re really exceptionally literary they know things that maybe almost no one knows. That proves how genuinely literary they are. It also is proof of the reader’s gross ignorance which is a good reason not to read highly literary works, prose as well as poetry. It sometimes takes a wounded ego a long time to recover from the attempt.

It seems there’s a continuum between expression and communication. A retired newspaper editor has sent me a few of his novels. He knows how to communicate, sell newspapers. He learned well the code: who, what, where, and when. I read his novels for the raw facts, but they’re not much fun. He might describe a woman’s dress as “red,” whereas the poet would describe the dress as “a red like the sun moments before dipping beneath the desert landscape.” Both trigger images in the brain, but the last one is replete with overtones that send the mind circling on a vaster voyage. If someone has never seen a desert sunset the phrase is lost in the wind. White is somewhere on that continuum but leaning very definitely toward the expressive end.

White’s novel depends on a knowledge of the sea, some familiarity with island people, and at least a perfunctory knowledge of trimming the sheets. If you think that has to do with hemming the material you sleep upon at night you might be better off not reading his book. I suspect White might include a phrase that is a personal delight even if no reader can really interpret it, but he does so frugally. He even manages to teach a few things about sailing a trimaran through hostile trade winds, and expanding one’s data base is worth the effort too.

I especially appreciated White’s efforts to write to the last page. So many recent novels hook a reader at the start, keep them churning along through most of the book, and then appear to give up at the last. It’s as though they are hearing some publisher say, “Get it done already. We’re already advertising the book.” Maybe they just don’t know how to bring it all to a conclusive ending that makes some sense; they don’t even try.

So, read Every Boat Turns South, cash in your IRAs, abandon the suburbs, kiss the kids goodbye, and look for your Tabula Rasa* with or without a Rosario.

* Tabula Rasa — A great name for a boat embarking upon which even us octogenarians may yet learn a thing or two.