Despite the teasing, mild torture, and occasional abuse as one of the few haoles (white people) at school, Finnegan-three years into his lifelong surf fever-is in heaven. Thus the book starts in 1966, our hero and his family freshly arrived from Los Angeles in Honolulu, where Finnegan’s father, a TV production manager, works on a variety show program. A staff writer with the New Yorker for more than 30 years, Finnegan can spin a mise-en-scène opening with the best of them. We begin this epic journey not in California but in Hawaii. Indeed, Barbarian Days is to the board what Moby Dick was to the whale: it is, among other things, a quest, a lexicon, a travelogue, a bildungsroman, a knowing colonial exegesis, a history of the activity, a tale of male friendships, a study of whiteness, a love poem to the ocean, and an intimate glimpse of a man grappling with his limits and the hint that beyond them is an incomprehensible void. Drawing on the author’s journals and experiences over 50 years, it reveals startling complexities to an activity so often associated with beach culture. So what happens between the ocean and the land that escapes on the page? Why is an activity that is so beautiful and popular also so indescribable?īarbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan’s memoir of his lifelong relationship to catching waves, is the extraordinary answer to this question.

Beach Boys songs aside, these are the reasons, if you live in the state, people back East ask: Do you surf? Duck into a bookshop, though, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find literature as spectacular as the lore. Mavericks and the gnarly waves at Half Moon Bay. There are 840 miles of coastline in California, some of which you can surf.

Barbarians surfing