Big Fish ~ Daniel Wallace

Big Fish
By Daniel Wallace

“I thought of him suddenly, and simply, as a boy, a child, a youth, with his whole life ahead of him, much as mine was ahead of me. I’d never done that before. And these images – the now and then of my father – converged, and at that moment he turned into a weird creature, wild, concurrently young and old, dying and newborn. My father became a myth.”

When we’re young we see our fathers as larger than life. They pick us up and fling us around. They have an answer for everything we want to know. Then, one day, we realize that they are simply human, with all the inadequacies of the human race, and not everyone can forgive them for that, for being human.

In Big Fish, Daniel Wallace writes a novel that returns a father to those mythic proportions while encompassing the frailties of humanity, embodied in having an affair and dying of a disease.

Edward Bloom was an absentee father. William Bloom has learned who his father is in jokes and tall tales his father told while he was home. Among the tall tales and stories of Edward Bloom’s life, four different versions of his death are related. In the beginning, Edward is cracking jokes and telling tall tales while William rejects the humor and begs for something real, to finally know his father before he dies. In the end, William accepts that the tall tales and jokes are how he will know and remember his father.

A work of Magic Realism, Big Fish takes reality and infuses it with elements of the myth or legend. Things happen in a way that could never happen in real life, but in doing so make the story more true than if it had happened realistically because, the truth is, impossible things happen in real life all the time. When that happens, we say, “Huh. What’s the chance of that?” and put it down to coincidence. It’s up to you whether you believe in coincidence or not.

My father always told stories of his life as a boy. They were realistic and I accepted them as fact. It took some time before I realized they could change a little bit with every telling. Did that make them not true? I like facts, that’s how my mind works, but stories offer truth in a slightly different way where the truth of the situation doesn’t always reside in the facts, but in the spirit of the telling.

This little book resounds with truth.