People of the Whale
“Hogan, a poet, essayist, and quintessential econovelist, dramatizes the interconnectivity of cultural extinction, environmental destruction, and war as she parallels Ruth’s courageous defense of the living world with Thomas’ suffering and secret life in Vietnam. She also links the near genocide of aboriginal peoples with the near extinction of marine life. Deeply ecological, original, and spellbinding, Hogan ascends to an even higher plane in this hauntingly beautiful novel of the hidden dimensions of life, and all that is now imperiled.”
Booklist (starred review)
Raised in a small Native American village by the sea, Thomas Witka Just has just married his childhood sweetheart when an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever. Cut off from his community and traumatized by war, he finds refuge in another tribal village there and fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home many years later, he finds his tribe in conflict over a decision to hunt a whale, a spiritual symbol for his people. Torn by guilt, yet desperate to return to a life of authenticity, Thomas realizes he must reconcile his two existences if he is to help heal his equally fractured community. With a keen sense of the sacredness of nature and the trauma of war, People of the Whale is a compassionate novel about the painful moral choices humans make and how the lost soul of a man or a people is restored.
Praise