Everybody loves comparing books to the movie versions, even if it’s a dubious tendency. Different mediums, after all. If anything, you might find yourself harboring a pet theory that the best movies out of Hollywood were born of original screenplays. “Casablanca,” naturally. They made it up as they went along. “Jerry Maguire”? I’d vote yes.
But now for the first time I find myself eager to see how an adaptation is handled. Of “Whalefall,” specifically. Great word, first of all, somehow devastating — the dead leviathan that slowly sinks to the sea floor, there to nourish and help spawn all manner of creatures, to wide ecological benefit.
The 2023 book of that name is by Daniel Kraus. Before he won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for “Angel Down,” his novel of the World War I trenches, he was probably best known for working with famous directors on books (George A. Romero, Guillermo del Toro). A film sensibility shows in the graphic nature of “Whalefall,” full of the slipperiest, squishiest, fleshiest, most sea-stinking prose you’re likely to find.
Because half of it’s set deep in a sperm whale’s digestive tract.
Jay Gardiner, a California teenager, is swallowed along with a giant squid as he scuba-dives off Monterey in search of his father’s body, or at least the fish-cleaned bones. His father, Mitt, a hard case, a legendary local diver who, as they say, was not made for this world, offed himself after a cancer diagnosis.
This fact, and not only the Monterey setting, brings us to John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” which father and son discuss more than once, among other things the oddity of its three suicides, two of them early on and one by unlikely way of icepick to the heart.
Jay and Mitt prompted me to pick it up, expecting the picaresque, the hardscrabble, and getting it, sans cannery workers, in point of fact, but in an episodic, not really novelistic, 180 pages that veer from bummy humor amid the adventures of the down and out to a kind of meditation on loneliness, heavy on the alcohol.
Never episodic, a meditation in its own way on difficult fathers and misfit sons, Daniel Kraus’s book leapfrogs the years and back again, yet always seamlessly, and keeps it up even when Jay’s in the belly of the beast with a little too much time to think about his predicament as his air tank slowly runs out.
No spoilers here, just curiosity for “Whalefall,” the movie. It opens tomorrow. I can almost smell the popcorn.