Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

I read three memoirs in short succession: this, Sum It Up (about the winningest NCAA basketball coach, Pat Summit), and Hillbilly Elegy (about marginalized, white Appalachian poor). It's hard not to compare, and this memoir - by New Yorker journalist and lifelong surfer, William Finnegan - is definitely the best-written, but also the most... indulgent? It's an artful, introspective look at a relatively easy life: while Finnegan does some “light war reporting” for the New Yorker, and things do get dicey there (though it's not really explored much), it's mostly about his various epic trips to far-flung surf spots (Fiji, Indonesia, a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic), and the sublime Zen of emerging from a wave's tube with dry hair.

I fetishize surfing, big time, so I gobble surf writing and surf photography up. I love the nature-ness of it, and the Zen-ness, and monotonous ritualism of it. And Finnegan writes about that stuff superbly. Just like The Wave, another surf book, many glorious passages are written about, basically, the same thing: dude rides wave. But I can never get enough! He also touches on the commercialization of surfing (bah!), and the fragility of our oceans (woe!).

Woven through the wave stuff is Bill Finnegan growing up: from anxious young teen in Hawaii, to super obnoxious self-involved Orientalist 20something (oh Lord, do I know people like this) on his shoestring surf world tour, to settling down 30something in San Francisco, to aging reporter discovering a sweet surf spot in the Atlantic while battling an older bro's body. You definitely feel his character maturing, and that's quite a writerly achievement. At least, I couldn't stand his 20something self-importance in Fiji (I also lived in Fiji for 2 years, and felt very eye-rolly at his descriptions, and omg his douchey desire to bed some “exotic ladies” uggghh), but he seemed a lot more tolerable by his 50s as a dedicated NYC surfer. Kudos for being honest, I guess.