Description
Marcellus, the giant Pacific octopus who narrates the short interleaved chapters of this novel, opens by telling us how long he has to live. Four years is the species’ allotment; he is on day 1,299; he counts toward the day his “sentence is complete.” A narrator who knows his own expiry date, and finds the prospect almost restful, is a strange engine for a book this warm — and it is the sharpest decision Shelby Van Pelt makes in her debut.
The story braids three solitudes in the small coastal town of Sowell Bay, Washington. Tova Sullivan, seventy, a stoic Swedish widow, cleans the local aquarium after hours and has arranged her life around the disappearance of her son Erik, who drowned three decades ago and was never recovered. Cameron Cassmore, thirty, is a likeable underachiever down in California, abandoned young by a mother he barely remembers, chasing the outline of a father he never knew. And Marcellus, who reads the plaques on his own tank and slips out of it most nights, watches Tova, works out who Cameron is, and — being an octopus — cannot say.
That last constraint is the hinge, and it rewards a closer look. The plot turns on a revelation: Cameron is Erik’s son, and so Tova’s grandson. Sowell Bay is where Erik and Cameron’s mother both grew up, so the threads share a root — but the book still needs an agent to draw them together, and its human characters spend most of the novel a single step from the truth. Van Pelt’s solution is to give the connective work to a creature who can deduce it, remember it, and act on it. Marcellus retrieves the proof the humans need — a class ring, dug out of the sand of a neighboring tank — and steers events toward reunion. He converts what would otherwise read as engineered into something closer to providence. He is the book’s permission slip.
It would be easy to stop there and call him a device. That would be wrong. Marcellus is the most alive writing in the book. His chapters are dry, exact, and mortal, and they carry a darkness the human chapters keep at arm’s length. Recalling a night he nearly failed to make it back to his tank, he reports, without melodrama: “For a moment, I considered this option. Nothing was something. What might lie on the other side of life?” Little in Cameron’s storyline, and not much in Tova’s, looks at the seafloor that steadily. The whimsy is packaging around a creature contemplating its own extinction, and Van Pelt writes that contemplation with more nerve than she brings to any human grief in the book.
The human half has a quieter achievement, and it belongs almost entirely to Tova. Van Pelt understands grief as a kind of administration: the unopened pay stubs stacked in a shoebox, the photographs of Erik kept in strict chronological order, the nightly round of the aquarium where Tova greets even the wolf eels she has no fondness for, because not greeting them would be rude. Here is a person who has built an entire life inside the shape of a loss, observed with patience and no sentimentality. When Tova lets herself briefly imagine that Erik might have left a child behind, she talks herself down at once: “And anyway, Tova doesn’t believe in exceptional strokes of luck.”
The plot then hands her precisely one. The ending does not simply reunite Tova with a grandson; it restores her, entirely. She gets the boy, an answer about how Erik died, a use for the fortune she never touched, a bright waterfront condo, a Thanksgiving table that fills from three settings to four. The bronze octopus statue she funds at the aquarium is the final flourish on a life rebuilt to specification. And the completeness of it works against the book’s own best perception. A novel that knew absence as something permanent — a thing you organize around, not through — closes that absence with an answer. The Tova who moved through the dark aquarium saying goodnight to each tank was a study in how a life accommodates what it cannot mend. Handing all of it back is kind to her, and slightly unfaithful to her.
Cameron’s chapters carry less, and not by accident. They run lighter, faster, nearer to sitcom; he is the most conventional figure here, his redemption visible from a long way off. But that lightness follows from the book’s appetite for comfort; it is not the flaw itself. Van Pelt has decided, early, that everyone will be all right. Marcellus is the only character she allows a harder fate.
His is the ending worth keeping. The novel takes its title from the plaque beside Marcellus’s tank, which tells visitors that octopuses are bright creatures; in his last chapter he turns the phrase back on people, and grants it to them only occasionally. He chooses the open water and the death waiting in it over the safety of the glass — the one character here allowed to want something the book will not make painless. The humans around him are rescued. He is freed, which is harder and better. By the final pages the town has cast him in bronze outside the aquarium, a statue for children to climb, shrinking him back to the plaque-sized creature he spent four years outgrowing. Van Pelt has written a warm, generous novel that looks hard at its darkest material exactly once, through the eye of an octopus, and that once is reason enough to read it.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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