ON WHALE ISLAND

A fleshed-out diary of a year spent on an island—man, woman, child, dogs—that, in its reflection of the quotidian, isn’t always totally engaging.

With a piece of the cash from his bestselling My Old Man and the Sea (1995), Hays purchased an island off the Canadian coast, 50 acres of unedited earth surrounded by the North Atlantic. It’s a place, as Hays tells it in his plainspoken, intelligent voice, to escape civilization, a wild land where he can find himself. Except now he has a wife and Stephan, her 11-year-old son, with all that age’s bright and dim spots. So what Hays must do is find himself within the matrix of family as he basks in the glory of the island landscape, a task he chronicles in this catalogue of days. Much of the material, though nicely shaped, is simply a recounting of activities: putting up wood for winter (though how they burn all that unseasoned wood is a mystery), making a dock, building and rebuilding all the stuff they need (and, killing time, don’t need: “Now comes the really stupid part: having forgotten why I am putting an unneeded shelf nowhere useful”). There is the process of getting to know Stephan, perhaps the most captivating aspect of the story, and the incessant bickering with his wife, perhaps the least captivating, though certainly the most pervasive. The island itself, which appears in fits and starts throughout the narrative, is an enigma—its heart an impenetrable spruce thicket—and readers must accept Hays’s love of the place rather than share it. What does come intensely across are those blood-red skies, all that weather, shrieking winds, stormy seas, and bell-clear days.

A taste of living theater, with all its entanglements, fragments, and doldrums.