Theroux's Polarizing Lenses

Under The Wave at Waimea is Paul Theroux’s Deep Dive Into Surfing—And Maybe Himself

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“The distant boy appeared climbing onto his outthrust board at the lip of the wave at Pipeline just before sunset—half the western sky glowing dusty pink, the light whittling his body small. He crouched on the board and dropped in and cut left, scissoring the face of the wave.”

These two sentences on page 192 that open Chapter 12 of Under the Wave of Waimea are so right they gave me the courage and sustenance to ride Paul Theroux’s 409-page novel to the end. It’s a big book, set in the jealously guarded gated community of pro and big-wave surfing—which are two distinct things, a distinction Theroux blurs—about a very small man. 

But back to those sentences. They’re beautiful. There’s a visual truth we all can recognize, if you’ve ever stood on the shore watching the lineup at some local break. The pacing, the feeling of action, movement, light and color; it’s all there, with the clincher that accurate-to-mariners description of the boy’s body “whittled small.” That’s how it looks and feels, all right, when you’re squinting against the sun. The diminishment of the boy hints at the plight of Theroux’s main character, Joe Sharkey, too; he’s the Benjamin Button of Hawai‘i’s cloistered North Shore surf scene, a legend growing smaller and smaller in our estimation, until by the end he’s like a little boy, almost embryonic. 

This is a conception that requires some authorial fortitude to pull off. One of the most convincing ways Theroux does it is by making Sharkey a mouthpiece for the most vapid surfer bro-speak—a variation of Valley Girl verbal fry and a linguistic pestilence we have known, loved, spoofed and lamented ever since Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys and Gidget. 

Sample line: “Getting tubed is like being born.” 

This is Sharkey’s response when his new girlfriend, Olive, tells him she’s pregnant. We laugh, we cringe, it feels like a cheap shot by Theroux and then… The mind crumples. That is, if you recall that you put a poster of an empty Pipeline barrel in the birthing room for your surfer wife to focus on as she pushed. (Her response was appropriate: “I don’t care about the fucking tube!”)

Theroux gets a lot right, strictly from a journalistic viewpoint, in Under the Wave at Waimea (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 13, 2021). This matters, of course, given the slack stereotypes and clueless commentary that surround the sport. In fact, one of the main things he gets right is how for many surfing isn’t a sport; it’s a way of life, even life itself, for many. Definitely for Sharkey.

Theroux lives on the North Shore half the year, so surfing has been in his sights for 30 years; sooner or later he had to have a go, like a big game hunter, you get the feeling. But the bar is high. The wave is big. For a writer like Theroux, who is a master of nonfiction and the unflinching detail, the subject comes very close to turning a microscope on himself, as we sense throughout the book. Substitute surfing for writing—this is Theroux’s 56th book—and you can detect the addict’s confession, especially if you’re one yourself. 

Give him credit for trying. Like his character and subject, an aging, white, big-wave surfer named Joe Sharkey, Theroux doesn’t back off. He takes the wave. He goes, as big wave icon Eddie Aikau, the subject of Eddie Would Go and a character in the book, once did. Like Sharkey, Theroux pits himself and his book against one stark question. Can he pull it off? Or does the wave at Waimea hold him down until he, and we, run out of breath, time and patience for Joe Sharkey?

My first inkling that world-traveler and -chronicler Theroux might set up shop in the Pacific came on a glassy day off Diamond Head in 1991 when I sighted what appeared to be an author headshot skimming past at sea level. My wife and I were waiting out a lull at Tongg’s. “I just saw Paul Theroux in a kayak,” I said at the exact moment she said “That was Paul Theroux!”

“To surf you have to master three things: locating the wave’s ideal takeoff spot, making the drop and completing the ride.”

In those days a kayak was about a rare a sight as a renowned author in Hawai‘i. But we’d heard rumors that he actually was spending a lot of time here. The man knew how to use his paddle, swift-blading along, looking as if he were out in a Triumph convertible with the top down. A year later when his book about kayaking around the Pacific came out—1992’s The Happy Isles of Oceania—I was also impressed at the effort he took to lug that boat with him. It acted as pretext for the book, a hook (Man Paddles Pacific), as a prop (good way to get the locals talking), as a practical way to see places no tourist ever saw and as plot (lots of trouble in airports, with taxis, in dangerous waters). 

That book was full of gem-like observations about remote places and peoples who were nonetheless changed by the thrusts of European contact, Asian extractive capitalism and modernity. Direct in its treatment of cultural differences and colonial outcomes, trenchant to the point of giving offense to many, slightly undercooked in places and unsparing of Theroux himself, it was unlike anything else out there at the time. The flash flood of social media has since stripped the places he visited of their uniqueness and remoteness, turning cultures into TikTok and IG fodder, which today lends the book the heft of an anchor, even if a cranky one, against time. You may not agree with what he’s saying about these places, but you want to go back to how they were when Theroux visited them.

He also settled in here, married, wrote Hotel Honolulu (2001). Theroux’s nonfiction tends toward the irascible and unpredictable, but there’s a soft heart beating underneath. Often he just can’t help himself, goes off, goes astray, does the deep dive, asks the uncomfortable question, usually to the reader’s benefit. His fiction, on the other hand, often seems woven on a loom strung by Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, both acknowledged influences. Hotel Honolulu was an observed, slice-of-life book that I felt could’ve been replicated like a touring Broadway show with cast changes in Kigali, Hong Kong, South London, Puerto Montt. “It’s a hotel novel, Jake,” as they say on Honolulu’s Hotel Street.  

Theroux followed up with a return to his first literary home, Africa, in Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari. The hyperbolic title is sort of an inside joke, as the book has a shaggy dog quality. Reviewing it in The Honolulu Weekly, I found it part of the literature of extremity, a grueling journey up southwest Africa’s coast to Namibia and Angola that tested his and my tolerance for the discomforts both physical and spiritual of going where nobody in their right mind goes. Strange and bracing, honest and self-doubting, it was Theroux’s “farewell to all that” for Africa, the continent that shaped and launched him as a writer. Calling it a “safari” was a hoot, given the book’s lack of tourist appeal and uncommercial truth-telling. 

Theroux followed up with Deep South in 2016, a serendipitous road trip that landed him in some real American awkwardness in the shade of those hot small-town trees that have seen some deep ugly. The book predicted our disastrous election, the battles of the Confederate statues, Donald Trump’s MAGAmerica; but it left an impression of hopeful respect because of the space given to Theroux’s heroes, many of them black, who keep building bridges in that most traumatized and revanchist region.

Unlike touring the South and turning it into a road show of America’s race problem, choosing to focus on the iconic sport of the Hawaiian Islands is a risk. It’s risky because, in literature as in film, the story of Hawai‘i surfing has been coopted from the start—famously told by strangers, visitors, non-surfers like Theroux, starting with Captain Cook. It was quickly and fatally conjoined with tourism due to Jack London indulging in some public relations on a board for the hotel industry. 

Since then the sport’s representation has moved on to breathless voyeurism in travel magazines, ecstatic odes in surfer magazines, rough trade eroticism in Vogue and fashion magazines, received the full dramatic treatment in books ranging from Stuart Coleman’s Eddie Would Go (2002) to Chas Smith’s Welcome to Paradise: Now Go to Hell (2014). The latter mines surfing’s nexus of sex drugs and violence, as does surfing’s most memorable novel, Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source (1984). 

Like any senior citizen topic, surfing now merits its own glossy historical quarterly, the impeccably produced and researched Surfer’s Journal. Former tubular hellman Gerry Lopez’s Surf Is Where You Find It is a properly revered philosophical text. His contemporary Dale Hope’s The Hawaiian Shirt is a gorgeous scholarly celebration of its most famous garment.

One risk Theroux does not take: tying surfing to its Hawaiian past and its cultural appropriation. Skirting this is problematic, especially when giving us cameo characters who mold the haole naif. One such is a Waikīkī Beach Boy named Uncle Sunshine, who mentors young Sharkey; another is Eddie Aikau, who gives Joe “the nod” in the lineup at Pipeline, sparing him a beating and granting him access. It’s sidekick territory; so is Moe, the adult Sharkey’s widebody drug dealer/fixer. With Moe we’re into Hawaii 5-0, Forgetting Sarah Marshall territory, expected to scarf up exoticized and racialized popcorn.  

These days other cultures are even trying to steal Hawai‘i’s claim as surfing’s birthplace and home. Among champions claiming they invented surfing, one cabal argues strenuously for Peru. These followers of Kon-Tiki’s Thor Heyrdahl, a Norwegian who argued “white gods” created the Inca Empire’s masterworks, join up with Chariots of the Gods wackjob Erich von Daniken; their argument is that Polynesians weren’t clever enough to invent surfing or open-ocean canoe navigation—so it had to be space aliens or at least those of European descent. Vikings, probably (although the “discoverer” of North America, Bjarni Herjolfsson, was too timid to land and turned tail for Greenland). 

Meanwhile, he‘e nalu is steadily being reclaimed by Native Hawaiians. One diligent kanaka maoli author, John Kukeakulani Clark, has written 10 books that carefully annotate surfbreaks, Hawaiian culture and lore. Surfing also makes regular landfall on the shoals of academia in works such as Isaiah Helekunihi Walker’s Waves of Resistance (2011). And it has its haole champions, who respect its origins and etiquette. 

With Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, surfing even has its Pulitzer Prize-winning book—something no other major sport can boast. An intellectual’s memoir of obsession and hedonism, it gives a full measure of surfing’s deeper springs, and the author’s wide-ranging interests and unsparing self-examination. The opposite of a Joe Sharkey.

To surf you have to master three things: locating the wave’s ideal takeoff spot, making the drop and completing the ride. The spot in the lineup is about ocean lore and familiarity and training; the drop is about timing and audacity and courage, plus split-second reflexes. The ride is the creative part—it’s a canvas, the wall before you that opens up as you fly down the face after takeoff. You can cut and slash and zigzag, opt for aerials and floaters; or, as was the style in the early days, Hawaiian style, you can find the line and ride with soul. 

These are much-debated topics even today; to score points in pro surfing, for instance, a soulful surfer such as Carissa Moore, Hawai‘i’s part Native Hawaiian world champion, has had to add all the circus tricks to her bag. But when the waves get big and tricks go by the wayside, she gets to let her soul side free and then—watch out. She carves.

Under the Wave at Waimea makes the drop with ease—the first 100 pages fly by. The Sharkey we first meet has the good luck to live on the North Shore. He’s a made man, welcome anywhere, hailed by strangers who know his signature accomplishments on the waves. But it’s at one of those primo North Shore surf houses—storied residences that have served as headquarters and party palaces for generations of top surfers and hangers-on—that a hot young surfer reveals he has no idea who Joe is, or was. And Sharkey realizes he’s slipped from modern memory without going away. 

Surfing competitively is a young man’s game. Big wave surfers can still go into their 40s, experience being their ace in the hole. But Sharkey is 62, eligible for Social Security (not that anyone mentions it; surfers of Sharkey’s era mostly got paid under the table). He’s aging out.

Worse, his “big” character is a façade. There is no Joe without surfing, or rather, without the recognition that he’s Joe the Shark. In the conclusion of the book’s first part, he decides to prove his vitality and tackles his dream of taking a (hypothetical) 100-foot wave at Nazare, in Portugal. But a younger big wave pal arrives a day ahead of him and pulls off the coup. All Joe can do is head out alone, with no witnesses besides fishermen, during hero Garrett McNamara’s press conference (another cameo by a real surfer). But Joe got his 100-foot wave, right? Sure, and we all remember who took second to Simone Biles in the Olympics.

It throws Joe into a tailspin. Only his new girlfriend, British ex-pat nurse Olive, cares. She’s got the Juliette Binoche role here, tending to The Surfing Patient, masked man of mystery, only Olive is more tart of the tongue and less patient than Binoche’s character. Olive likes to rip off bandages, you see. 

It’s at this low moment that Sharkey hits a homeless man bicycling in a torrential downpour on the wrong side of the road at night. Here is the mainspring of the novel, we realize. Two men, seemingly very different, closer than they appear in the rearview mirror. Bang! Now one is dead and the other faces hard choices.

The setup is a bit like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, where arrogant bond trader Sherman McCoy is blamed for hitting and killing a black teenager at a freeway onramp and suffers through a purgatory of humiliations until he’s penniless and lost in the criminal justice system. McCoy wasn’t at the wheel; his fate is a demonstration of how society can pile onto a person for no reason other than he’s obnoxiously successful. 

“Surfing saves him, even as it erases him.”

Theroux has a journey of self-knowledge and expiation in store for Sharkey, too. But of a very different kind. Sharkey faces no hard time, not even hard choices. His name is recognized by the cop on the scene, who never thinks to ask if he’s had a drink (or five, with a joint). Same with the coroner. A homeless guy died on the highway—who cares?

Olive does. 

Already spiraling down, Sharkey is in no mood for introspection. Even as various minor disasters escalate (a sore toe, a centipede bite, then a near-drowning at Waimea), he refuses to consider he might be cursed, or jinxed, or under a bad sign. But Olive sees it and also sees him sinking into emptiness, a stoned vacuity that has her packing her bags.

Instead of leaving she rousts him and sets him on a journey—she doing all the hard work—of finding out who the dead guy was.

And it’s here that Theroux breaks the book, on page 107, to start a long backstory dive. We settle into a different novel, of an emotionally stunted childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and middle age. The chapter that kicks it off, called “Haole—the Scar,” goes straight inside Hawai‘i’s racial divisions and the particular grievance complex white residents must adapt to or forever be miserable, resentful, angry and, if in a position of power, often vengeful.

“History of a Hero,” this second part, is Joe’s history, which under one lens is simply a history of white privilege twisted by circumstances and fate into white victimization. You have to give Theroux credit for not shying away from a difficult subject. (Eddie would go!) With an absent military father whose real love is the Vietnam war, and a smothering alcoholic mother who stepped out of a Tennessee Williams play, young Joe has a blunted affect and life. In his public school he’s a rare pale face and pays the price for it, every hour of every day.  

Surfing saves him, even as it erases him. This, too, feels accurate. Sharkey is like the millions of pimpled unpopular, abused or alienated adolescents who’ve found themselves staying out longer and longer in the sea, the hours blending together, their anxieties floating away with the undulation of the waves. Finnegan was one; so was I (and saltwater turned out to be a cure for acne); so was my wife.

“History of a Hero” follows Joe through life, setting us up for the reckoning we already know is coming. We register his first serious love affair with a young Chinese surfer from Hawai‘i—that boy “whittled small” turns out to be a girl—who makes the daring step of introducing him to her closed-off family. It doesn’t go well and Sharkey doesn’t fight for May, seeing the hopelessness of being the outsider, the haole. 

What’s left is waves and “surf bunnies,” groupies of low self-esteem and no expectations. Joe travels in search of undiscovered atolls and reefs around the world with a blasé attitude that is also familiar to one who’s heard a lot of surfers talk about their faraway adventures, which are all the same. These guys, and Sharkey, are like the unreflective college student who, when asked if he saw the Cathedral of Notre Dame on his year abroad, answers, “Yeah—the fire-blowing dude was amazing. And the soft pretzels.”

We itch to get to get back to Olive, and the dead homeless guy, and Sharkey’s quest. Part II takes about 50 pages too long to get there. We begin to enter Sharkey’s entropic zone.

Some of these pages are taken up with Sharkey’s shallow and chaotic friendship with Hunter Thompson, who fixates on The Shark as an exemplar of the extremes he seeks. (This is not far-fetched: Thompson was a frequent Hawai‘i visitor in his post-Fear and Loathing days.) Sharkey never seems to quite understand the attraction, but dutifully returns it; he knows a celebrity clusterfuck when he sees one, from his pro surfing days. Like Sharkey, Thompson doesn’t know what to do with himself when he isn’t doing the one thing he loves, which in his case is writing. But there’s no Olive to save Thompson; he blows his brains out after a late-night call. To Sharkey. 

Theroux is doing a post-mortem of whiteness, selfishness, rugged individualism. He’s asking a key question in today’s world of reparative justice, systematic incarceration and the Hawaiian practice of ho‘oponopono: Can this person, this man, this sinner, maybe even the white man plural, be saved?

In part three, “The Paddle-Out,” Olive and Moe, his drug dealer, haul Sharkey off to homeless encampments looking for anyone who knew the dead man. The camp scenes are familiar. Theroux’s nonfiction reporting method is to arrive, hire a guide, find a hotel and process the characters along the way like raw material. He follows his nose and the whimsy of the place, observing, keeping score, commenting, mood darkening, pessimism confirmed, until—we hope—he finds someone who redeems the place despite its aura of failure. 

Here Theroux rubs Sharkey’s nose in failure. Deploying his tough nonfiction writing persona, his details, his eye, Theroux through Sharkey’s eyes focuses on the dispossessed, their quirks and eccentricities, their spiky pride and dissonance. He wants to nail Sharkey—and you, Dear Reader—with hard truths about the problems of paradise: poverty, drugs, sexual violations, stolen lives and dreams, a stolen kingdom, government by corruption.  

During these scenes I got a déjà vu that Hawai‘i was getting the treatment Theroux gave Africa, the Deep South, the Mosquito Coast of Honduras. But I could also feel him fighting it through his prose in this book, looser than I’ve experienced it in his other works, deeper and more attuned to inner rhythms, the sentences longer and more indeterminate. To convey Joe Sharkey, Theroux has gone into a persona that might otherwise be unrewarding or uninteresting for him in his nonfiction, where he’s a journalist in search of the pithy insight, the telling remark, the crisp talking head expert. Joe Sharkey would earn an amusing anecdote and a kiss-off one-liner in The Happy Isles of Oceania, you get the feeling. But not here. It’s an ambitious book for that reason. 

But is it worth it, all this space devoted to an aging out-of-sorts white surfer of not-quite top ranking, a guy who’s a champion of self-centeredness?

So here’s the thing. I enjoyed the book, even with all the alarms and red flags going off. It is a rare big novel about Hawai‘i that did deliver a fat slice of a certain view of the place, if seen through Polarizing lenses—polarizing lenses, too. 

Does Joe Sharkey deserve all this ink? Does his futless redemption make up for his 50-year lack of interest in others, in the world, in justice, in cultures, even in pop culture? (He’s the first adolescent I’ve ever encountered who had a bong in his hand but never a song in his head.)

It’s a tall order. But I finished the book because I had to know. Maybe that’s all we can ask these days of others when we lay our story on the line: Do you care enough to care? The Shark awaits your reply.

He also speaks his own truth, near the end of his Benjamin Button regression to infancy: “Even after fifty years in Hawai‘i, I’m still a fucken haole… The only people who really belong here are Hawaiians.”

Coming from Theroux, a man who prides himself on knowing his place, this is quite the implied acknowledgement. When Sharkey follows up by ruminating that he, too, is just another drunken homeless guy, we can feel him hitting bottom. From that point on, the only thing you can do is swim for the light and hope you don’t drown before you get there. It’s like getting born.

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