THE OCEAN ABOVE ME

A South Carolina shrimp boat capsizes, imperiling not only the crew, but the journalist accompanying them.

The first novel from Sites, a journalist acclaimed for his nonfiction accounts of what it's like to report on war and crisis, features a protagonist who seems very much like him—an intrepid war correspondent with psychic battle scars from Iraq and Afghanistan who is committed to telling stories that encompass all the collateral damage of warfare. This multimedia journalist, Lukas Landon, has also suffered damage—his war experience pretty much ended his marriage and sent his career into a downward spiral—and he has been bottoming out at a small-market paper. He launches a “series on South Carolina’s beleaguered commercial shrimping industry,” which offers him a microcosm with which to address all sorts of issues—climate change, racism, competition from Asian fishing operations, and increasing regulations, often violated. The ship on which he is embedded is named Philomena, “one of the patron saints of lost causes”; the captain, Clarita Esteban, is a Black U.S. Army veteran with a war background similar to Lukas’ and a motley crew. This December trip is the last of a disappointing virgin season for the captain and crew, and they need to shore up their losses. Instead, a bad storm sinks the boat on the novel’s very first pages, breaking Lukas’ ribs and knocking some teeth out of his mouth, trapping him in the latrine, where an air bubble allows him a few days’ leeway. For the rest of the novel, he has no idea whether the others are dead or alive, as he ruminates on what has brought him to this peril (and existential crisis) and how he might survive to tell the crew’s stories that have given him reason to live. Framed by passages from T.S. Eliot, Conrad, and Shakespeare, and with Thoreau as the protagonist’s lucky talisman, the novel dresses an action thriller’s survival story in literary filigree.

The plot and social commentary feel a little bloated, but the suspense is sustained to the end.