Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, by Daniel Wallace

In Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998), by Daniel Wallace, a son tries to make sense of his father in the waning days and moments of the older man’s life. The novel is a shifting, flowing narrative of episodes, some told by the father, some told or imagined by the son, that yearn towards explaining and mythologizing the father’s life and character.

The father is Edward Bloom, and the last name is a clear reference to Leopold Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce makes his Bloom an archetypal Everyman and embeds in the activities of his life a set of mythic correspondences and references that link him to Odysseus, the wandering hero of Homer. Stephen Dedalus in that novel plays Telemachus to the Odyssean Leopold.

In Big Fish, the links to myth and epic legends are more explicit. Magic events and people shift in and out of the narrative, and even when William acknowledges them as imaginary, fabricated, they nonetheless enter into the story of Edward’s life, as much metaphor as fact.

This is a short and slight novel. There is much to like about it, though it flags towards the end. The 2003 film Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton, actually does a better job of executing the concept of the novel—a son imagining and coming to terms with his father, by retelling and remembering his father’s own tall tales and stories—than the novel does.

Big Fish is set in Alabama, and the tall-tale narrative tradition of Southern culture and literature stretch out behind the novel. So too does the convention of a son trying to come to terms with a father who was often absent and not always the best of parents. For William, the events of his father’s life, however he might have heard of them, take on the power and numinous aspects of myth, of a heroic chronicle of Herculean tasks and Odyssean journeys.

The first half of the novel works with a flowing, shifting rhythm, like that of sleep and wakefulness, of dreams, of ocean currents. If the novel falters slightly in the end, it concludes soon enough that the lapse can be forgiven. This is a good and promising first novel for Daniel Wallace.