John Straley’s Big Breath In is among the strangest crime novels I’ve encountered. It doesn’t always work—and, in places, not at all—but it is thought-provoking and unexpected, a thriller set in the Pacific Northwest that is ambitious in its range. In part, this has to do with the book’s protagonist, Delphine, a retired marine biologist turned amateur detective. In her late 60s and recently widowed, Delphine has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is barely hanging on. Before she leaves this world, she intends to write a series of memos about her research into oceanic mammals: orcas and humpbacks, but primarily sperm whales. Still, even as Delphine is dying, the press of life endures. This is the conundrum of mortality, that even as the body is failing, the mind, the spirit, remain.
For Delphine, the physical world has narrowed to the Seattle neighborhood that houses both the hospital where she is in treatment and the SRO where she and many other patients stay. She has been in the city for five months, having arrived from her home in Sitka, Alaska, where her late husband, John, worked as a criminal defense investigator. One of the key dynamics of the novel is the balance between Delphine’s work in the wilds of the open ocean and John’s experience navigating a much bleaker human wilderness. “The first step in solving any mystery,” Straley writes, by way of explanation, “is to imagine the setting and movement of the principals. Then, to go out into the world and intercept your actors in the wild. Sperm whales locate themselves in three dimensions: the two dimensions as represented on a chart, and then at depth, since their potential habitat is the entire ocean basin.”
Sperm whales are everywhere in Big Breath In, maybe more so than in any novel since Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. “Melville’s insight,” Straley notes, “stems from the sperm whale’s size and mystery, so much so that their size and mystery became a metaphor for our relationship with God, or perhaps awe itself. The rest of our awareness of sperm whales came to us from the industrial killing of them.” That’s a complicated juxtaposition, with wonder on the one side and wholesale devastation on the other, but it works because the territory is similar to the one in which Delphine finds herself. After witnessing an act of violence, she becomes allied with a young mother named Leigh, who may or may not be a participant in a gray market adoption scheme run out of another Seattle hotel.
This is where the novel is at its strongest, imagining and then setting in motion a United States very much like the one we occupy. The time is the present, or a version of it in which Congress has enacted a nationwide abortion ban. “In response,” Straley writes, “state and local governments had thrown money at the problem by making it easier to adopt out.” Hospitals are now “the central distributor of infant supplies in many big cities.” The extrapolation is small but significant, the changing of a single detail that alters the fabric of reality itself. Elsewhere, things remain the same: Leigh is under the thumb of a suspected former pimp named Tyler, who has turned his attention to baby harvesting. He deals with white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Yakima, 140 miles east of Seattle, where the second half of the novel is set.
I’m reminded of Philip Roth, who once told me regarding his novel The Plot Against America that “the simplest thing to do—and perhaps the best thing to do—was to change just one thing: that is, the result of the 1940 election. Have Lindbergh run and win. But leave everything else in place.” The difference, of course, is that Roth was writing retrospectively, whereas Straley is describing an alternative present or near future that, in the wake of our debacle of an election, could very well come to pass.
For Straley, such a shift offers an opportunity to trace a connection between humans and cetaceans, both of which, he often reminds us, have large brains. “Some big-brained mammals,” he observes, “like sperm whales and elephants, seem to foster a type of matriarchy.… Sperm whales take turns holding the calf on their backs or on their flukes while the baby takes its first breaths.” In contrast, “a baby human…cannot lift its head up…can barely see its mother and likely does not recognize the separation of self and mother for months.”
Is it any wonder, then, that as Big Breath In progresses, Delphine becomes involved with a community of women as she pursues Tyler, who has left Seattle with three babies, intent on settling some scores? Here, too, Straley creates a fictional dynamic that is not only believable but also moving in its portrayal of the necessities that might arise for many people in a nation where abortion has been outlawed.
And yet, it is in these sections that the novel begins to become ham-handed, while also straining the limits of credulity. At times, this is a matter of minor details, as when Delphine dismisses the diminutive leader of a motorcycle gang called the Rolling 88’s as “peewee” and “shrimpy,” a choice that seems unnecessary and unwise. Why, after all, would Delphine shift into the derogatory? For one thing, it seems out of character. But even more, it puts her at risk.
Then there is the novel’s culminating sequence, a set piece involving, among other elements, an exegesis in which Delphine explains her conclusions at great length. The effect is both to bog down the narrative—nothing deflates a moment of high tension more than too much talking—and to tie things up too neatly. I understand the intention, but it belies the essential focus of the book. Delphine is dying; that is what will happen, although to imagine it as closure is to underestimate the stakes. “The thing about making loose plans, plans not pinned down,” she reflects, “was the underlying assumption that she would be alive to honor any promise.” In such a circumstance, there is only this moment and then the next one, if we get to meet it. The tenuousness, the inconstancy, must be as true of the novel as they are of life.
Not infrequently, when I discuss narrative with students, I refer to the insufficiency of plot. What I mean is that plot is a contrivance, a necessity to keep a reader turning pages long enough to get to the real material, the emotional material, underneath. Straley’s novel represents a case in point; it is less about Delphine’s investigation than her existential condition, her values and her vision, the way she has chosen to live. Ultimately, the lure for her are all those trafficked children and making sure they are safe. In that, she is not unlike the female sperm whales and the calves they protect. Big-brained mammals again, although, as Straley regularly reminds us, the brain is not enough. Rather, it will be community that protects us, if we can be protected at all.
Or, as Delphine tells a police officer late in the novel after he asks why she became involved: “I was worried about the babies.… Nothing more.”•
