Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions

by Daniel Wallace

Overview

In his prime, Edward Bloom was an extraordinary man. He could outrun anybody. He never missed a day of school. He saved lives and tamed giants. Animals loved him, people loved him, women loved him. He knew more jokes than any man alive. At least that’s what he told his son, William. But now Edward Bloom is dying, and William wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive father—this indefatigable teller of tall tales—before it’s too late. So, using the few facts he knows, William re-creates Edward’s life in a series of legends and myths, through which he begins to understand his father’s great feats, and his great failings. The result is hilarious and wrenching, tender and outrageous.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616201647
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	05/15/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	196
Sales rank:	63,253
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Daniel Wallace has published stories in numerous magazines, including Story, Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah. His first novel, Big Fish, was translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Daniel Wallace now lives with his son, Henry, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he also works as an illustrator.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

                    One of our last car trips, near the end of my father's life as a man, we stopped by a river, and we took a walk to its banks, where we sat in the shade of an old oak tree.

    After a couple of minutes my father took off his shoes and his socks and placed his feet in the clear-running water, and he looked at them there. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. I hadn't seen him smile like that in a while.

    Suddenly he took a deep breath and said, "This reminds me."

    And then he stopped, and thought some more. Things came slow for him then if they ever came at all, and I guessed he was thinking of some joke to tell, because he always had some joke to tell. Or he might tell me a story that would celebrate his adventurous and heroic life. And I wondered, What does this remind him of? Does it remind him of the duck in the hardware store? The horse in the bar? The boy who was knee-high to a grasshopper? Did it remind him of the dinosaur egg he found one day, then lost, or the country he once ruled for the better part of a week?

    "This reminds me," he said, "of when I was a boy."

    I looked at this old man, my old man with his old white feet in this clear-running stream, these moments among the very last in his life, and 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.

I

The Day He Was Born

He was born during the driest summer in forty years. The sun baked the fine red Alabama clay to a grainy dust, and there was no water for miles. Food was scarce, too. No corn or tomatoes or even squash that summer, all of it withered beneath the hazy white sky. Everything died, seemed like: chickens first, then cats, then pigs, and then dogs. Went into the stew, though, the lot, bones and all.

    One man went crazy, ate rocks, and died. It took ten men to carry him to his grave he was so heavy, ten more to dig it, it was so dry.

    Looking east people said, Remember that rolling river?

    Looking west, Remember Talbert's Pond?

    The day he was born began as just another day. The sun rose, peered down on the little wooden house where a wife, her belly as big as the country, scrambled up the last egg they had for her husband's breakfast. The husband was already out in the field, turning the dust with his plow round the black and twisted roots of some mysterious vegetable. The sun shone hard and bright. When he came in for his egg he wiped the sweat from his brow with a ragged blue bandanna. Then he wrung the sweat from it and let it drip into an old tin cup. For something to drink, later on.

    The day he was born the wife's heart stopped, briefly, and she died. Then she came back to life. She'd seen her self suspended above herself. She saw her son, too--said he glowed. When her self rejoined with herself she said she felt a warmth there.

    Said, "Soon. He'll be here soon."

    She was right.

    The day he was born someone spotted a cloud over thataway, with something of a darkness to it. People gathered to watch. One, two, two times two, suddenly fifty people and more, all looking skyward, at this rather small cloud moving close to their parched and frazzled home place. The husband came out to look, too. And there it was: a cloud. First real cloud in weeks.

    The only person in that whole town not cloud-watching was the wife. She had fallen to the floor, breathless with pain. So breathless she couldn't scream. She thought she was screaming--she had her mouth open that way--but nothing was coming out. Of her mouth. Elsewhere, though, she was busy. With him. He was coming. And where was her husband?

    Out looking at a cloud.

    That was some cloud, too. Not small at all, really, a respectable cloud, looming large and gray over all the dried-up acres. The husband took off his hat and squinted, taking a step down off the porch for a better look.

    The cloud brought a little wind with it, too. It felt good. A little wind brushing gently across their faces felt good. And then the husband heard thunder--boom!--or so he thought. But what he heard was his wife kicking over a table with her legs. Sure sounded like thunder, though. That's what it sounded like.

    He took a step farther out into the field.

    "Husband!" his wife screamed then at the top of her lungs. But it was too late. Husband was too far gone and couldn't hear. He couldn't hear a thing.

    The day he was born all the people of the town gathered in the field outside his house, watching the cloud. Small at first, then merely respectable, the cloud soon turned huge, whale-size at least, churning strikes of white light within it and suddenly breaking and burning the tops of pine trees and worrying some of the taller men out there; watching, they slouched, and waited.

    The day he was born things changed.

    Husband became Father, Wife became Mom.

    The day Edward Bloom was born, it rained.

In Which He Speaks to Animals

My father had a way with animals, everybody said so. When he was a boy, raccoons ate out of his hand. Birds perched on his shoulder as he helped his own father in the field. One night, a bear slept on the ground outside his window, and why? He knew the animals' special language. He had that quality.

    Cows and horses took a peculiar liking to him as well. Followed him around et cetera. Rubbed their big brown noses against his shoulder and snorted, as if to say something specially to him.

    A chicken once sat in my father's lap and laid an egg there--a little brown one. Never seen anything like it, nobody had.

The Year It Snowed in Alabama

It never snowed in Alabama and yet it snowed the winter my father was nine. It came down in successive white sheets, hardening as it fell, eventually covering the landscape in pure ice, impossible to dig out of. Caught below the snowy tempest you were doomed; above it, you merely had time to consider your doom.

    Edward was a strong, quiet boy with a mind of his own, but not one to talk back to his father when a chore needed doing, a fence mended, a stray heifer lured back home. As the snow started falling that Saturday evening and on into the next morning, Edward and his father first built snowmen and snow towns and various other constructions, realizing only later that day the immensity and danger of the unabating snowfall. But it's said that my father's snowman was a full sixteen feet tall. In order to reach that height, he had engineered a device made out of pine branches and pulleys, with which he was able to move up and down at will. The snowman's eyes were made out of old wagon wheels, abandoned for years; its nose was the top of a grain silo; and its mouth--in a half-smile, as if the snowman were thinking of something warm and humorous--was the bark cut from the side of an oak tree.

    His mother was inside cooking. Smoke rose from the chimney in streams of gray and white, curling into the sky. She heard a distant picking and scraping outside the door, but was too busy to pay it much mind. Didn't even look up when her husband and son came in, a half hour later, sweating in the cold.

    "We've got ourselves a situation," her husband said.

    "Well," she said, "tell me about it."

    Meanwhile, the Snow continued to fall and the door they'd just dug through to was nearly blocked again. His father took the shovel and cleared a passage again.

    Edward watched--Father shovel, snow fall, Father shovel, snow fall--until the roof of the cabin itself started creaking. His mother found that a snowdrift had formed in their bedroom. They reckoned it was time they got out.

    But where to? All the living world was ice now, pure white and frozen. His mother packed up the food she'd been cooking and gathered together some blankets.

    They spent that night in the trees.

    The next morning was a Monday. The snow stopped, the sun rose. The temperature hovered below zero.

    Mother said, "About time you got off to school, isn't it Edward?"

    "I guess it is," he said, no questions asked. Which is just the kind of boy he was.

    After breakfast he climbed down from the tree and walked the six miles to the little schoolhouse. Saw a man frozen in a block of ice on the way there. About froze himself, too--didn't, though. He made it. He was a couple of minutes early, in fact.

    And there was his schoolmaster, sitting on a wood pile, reading. All he could see of the schoolhouse was the weather vane, the rest of it buried beneath the weekend's snowfall.

    "Morning, Edward," he said.

    "Morning," Edward said.

    And then he remembered: he'd forgotten his homework.

    Went back home to get it.

    True story.

His Great Promise

They say he never forgot a name or a face or your favorite color, and that by his twelfth year he knew everybody in his home town by the sound their shoes made when they walked.

    They say he grew so tall so quickly that for a time--months? the better part of a year?--he was confined to his bed because the calcification of his bones could not keep up with his height's ambition, so that when he tried to stand he was like a dangling vine and would fall to the floor in a heap.

    Edward Bloom used his time wisely, reading. He read almost every book there was in Ashland. A thousand books--some say ten thousand. History, Art, Philosophy. Horatio Alger. It didn't matter. He read them all. Even the telephone book.

    They say that eventually he knew more than anybody, even Mr. Pinkwater, the librarian.

    He was a big fish, even then.

Table of Contents

Part I

The Day He Was Born

In Which He Speaks to Animals

The Year it Snowed in Alabama

His Great Promise

My Father's Death: Take 1

The Girl in the River

His Quiet Charm

How He Tamed the Giant

In Which He Goes Fishing

The Day He Left Ashland

Entering a New World

Part II

The Old Lady and the Eye

My Father's Death: Take 2

His First Great Love

His Legendary Legs

In Which He Makes a Move

The Fight

On Meeting the In-Laws

His Three Labors

He Goes to War

My Father's Death: Take 3

The Day I Was Born

How He Saw Me

How He Saved My Life

His Immortality

His Greatest Power

In Which He Has a Dream

Part III

In Which He Buys a Town, and More

How it Ends

My Father's Death: Take 4

Big Fish

What People are Saying About This

Lee Smith

I have a feeling that Big Fish is going to make a very big splash! -- Author of News of the Spirit

Winston Groom

A talented and fascinating writer. Daniel Wallace has created a jewel in Big Fish.

Editorial Reviews

A charming whopper of a tale.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Both comic and poignant.” —The New York Times“Refreshing, original . . . Wallace mixes the mundane and the mythical. His chapters have the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A comic novel about death, about the mysteries of parents and the redemptive power of storytelling.” —USA Today

“An audacious, highly original debut novel . . . An imaginative, and moving, record of a son’s love for a charming, unknowable father.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

In this first novel, Daniel Wallace...adds legends and folk tales from the Southern backwoods, throws in a smattering of Greek myth and attaches a few of his own inventions. Applying all of these...resulted in a story that is both comic and poignant. -- New York Times Book Review

James Polk

As long as sons have fathers, deciphering what’s not said between them will remain a boy’s most important rite of passage to adulthood. William, the gently cynical narrator of Wallace’s wonderful and elegant first novel, completes this rite by mythologizing his father, Edward Bloom, after his death.
Each chapter relates a self-contained story about Edward, fashioned from the jokes, tall tales and allegories William heard his father tell about himself over the years. Beginning with a miraculous birth in rural Alabama and proceeding through romantic encounters, tests of prowess, a few less-than-Herculean labors and, yes, a big fish story, we learn the general outlines of Edward’s life: He was a small-town boy who became an extremely successful business man and modestly successful family man.
As the novel progresses, so does William’s understanding of all the cock-and-bull stories. This change is the book’s most impressive feature. Rather than throwing the reader a sentimental epiphany, Wallace manipulates the narratorial voice with masterly finesse and sensitivity to render a motionless, quiet transformation in William. Wallace delivers handsomely with a wise story that is a delight to read.
—Dan Koenig

'People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction,' writes Wallace in his refreshing, original debut, which ignores the conventional retelling of the events and minutiae of a life and gets right to the poetry of a son's feelings for and memories of his father. William Bloom's father, Edward, is dying. He dies in fact in four different takes, all of which have William and his mother waiting outside a bedroom door as the family doctor tells them it's time to say their goodbyes. He intersperses the four takes with stories (all filtered through William's mind and voice) about the elusive Edward, who spent long periods of time on the road away from home and admitted once to his son that he had yearned to be a great man. The father and son deathbed conversations have son William playing earnest straight man, while his father is full of witticisms and jokes. In a plainspoken style dotted with transcendent passages, Wallace mixes the mundane and the mythical. His chapters have the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale, and the novel's roomy structure allows the mystery and lyricism of the story to coalesce.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

An audacious, highly original debut novel, in which a son attempts to resolve the mysteries surrounding his father by re-creating the man's life as a series of exuberant tall tales. Edward Bloom has grown wealthy running his own import/export business. Restlessly wandering the world, he has returned home to see his wife and son only at rare, unpredictable intervals. Now, however, he's come home to die, and William is desperate to understand something of his father's life and character before he vanishes. But his father, an incorrigible jokester, deflects all of his son's queries with one-liners. A baffled William, waiting for the end, begins to create a series of tall tales in which his enigmatic parent is remade as a paradigmatic American folk hero. Growing up in Alabama as a 'strong quiet boy, with a mind of his own,' this mythic version of Edward has an affinity with wild animals and the uncanny. He reads every book in town, tames a lonely giant who has taken to eating the locals' crops and dogs, and hitches a ride on a giant catfish. As a young man he saves a child from an unearthly dog, rescues a lovely water spirit, and returns an enchanted eye to its rightful owner. As a wealthy older man he preserves a small southern town from the rancorous present by becoming its feudal lord. William narrates these stories in a language that nicely mixes the simplicity and tang of the folk tale with a droll, knowing sense of humor. All the episodes seem infused with a defiant, despairing love; in the end, the dying Edward outwits death by transforming himself into (literally) a 'big fish,' which his son returns to its ancestral waters. More a series of ingenious sketches than a cohesive novel,but, still, a vigorous updating of the purely American genre of the tall taleþas well as an imaginative, and moving, record of a son's love for a charming, unknowable father.

Kirkus Reviews

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