Big Fish

by Daniel Wallace

  I look into his gray-blue dying eyes. We’re staring at each other, showing each other our last looks, the faces we’ll take with us into eternity, and I’m thinking how I wish I knew him better, how I wish we’d had a life together, wishing my father wasn’t such a complete and utter goddamn mystery to me, and I say, “There’s this man,” I say. “There’s this man, and he’s a poor man, but he needs a suit, and—”

  Big Fish

  And he smiled. Then he cast his gaze around the room, and he winked at me. He winked!

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

  “Out of here?” I said. “Dad, you’re in no condition—”

  “There’s a fold-up wheelchair in the bathroom,” he said. “Wrap a blanket around me. As soon as we get off this hall, we’ll be in the clear. But we don’t have much time. Hurry, son!”

  I did as he asked, I don’t know why. I stepped into the bathroom and saw he was right. There was a wheelchair behind the bathroom door, folded up like a child’s stroller. I unfolded it and wheeled it to his bed, where I wrapped him with a pale brown blanket, covering his head like a monk’s habit. I lifted him, with a disturbing ease, from his bed and into the chair. I had no gotten no stronger in the last few months, but he had become considerably smaller.

  “Go for it!” he said.

  I opened the door to his room and peeked out into the hallway. I saw Mom at the nurse’s desk with Dr. Bennett, wiping her eyes with a tissue and nodding. I pushed my father in the opposite direction. I dared not even look behind me to see if they had spied us. I just pushed him fast, hoping for the best, and when we came to a corner went around it. Only then did I allow myself a backward view.

  Nobody.

  So far, so good.

  “So. Where are we going?” I asked him, catching my breath.

  “The elevators,” he said, his voice a little bit muffled below the blanket. “The elevator to the lobby to wherever you parked your car. Parking deck?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then take me there,” he said. “Now. We don’t have much time.”

  The elevator came and I pushed him on. The door closed behind us, and when they opened again I wheeled him out of there with a daredevil’s panache, past a host of doctors in green and white, past nurses holding charts giving me sidelong glances and finally staring. Everybody in the lobby paused and stared at us, knowing this wasn’t right somehow, but by then I was traveling at such speed that no one had the time to think to stop us. They simply looked at us as though they had seen something odd—and they had, too, odder than they knew. And then we were gone, wheeling toward the parking deck into a cool spring wind.

  “Good job,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Still need to hurry, though, Will,” he said. “I need some water. I need some water bad.”

  “I have some in the car,” I said. “A thermos full.”

  “More than that,” he said and laughed.

  “We’ll get more,” I said.

  “I know you will, son,” he said. “I know it.”

  When we got to the car I lifted him out of the wheelchair and placed him in the front seat. I folded the wheelchair and threw it in the back.

  “We won’t be needing that,” he said.

  “We won’t?” I said.

  “Not where we’re going,” he said, and I thought I heard him laugh again.

  But he didn’t tell me where we were going, not at first. I simply drove away from everything I knew: the hospital, his old office, home. When I looked at him for a clue he was silent, covered in the blanket.

  “That water, William?” he said after a minute.

  “Oh,” I said. “Here.”

  It was beside me on the seat. I opened the top and passed it to him. One shaky, scaly hand appeared from beneath the folds and took it from me. But instead of drinking it, he poured it all over himself. The blanket was soaked.

  “Ahh,” he said. “That’s the ticket.”

  Still, he didn’t take the blanket off.

  “Go north on Highway 1,” he told me, but I had to strain to hear him. His voice was muffled beneath the blanket, and seemed to come from far away.

  “North on Highway 1,” I said.

  “There’s a place there,” he said. “There’s a river. A place by the river.”

  “Edward’s Grove,” I said to myself.

  And he said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I took the car down a series of streets, through the city and the surrounding suburbs, where the sun was rising over the roofs and treetops, until finally we broke into the deep, green, beautiful country. Suddenly we were surrounded by it: trees and farms and cows and an azure sky, a home for clouds and the occasional bird. I’d been out this way, once before.

  “How far now?” I asked him.

  “Just a couple more miles, I think,” he said. “I hope. I don’t feel so good.”

  “What’s there?” I asked, but for an answer all I got was a shivering inside the damp blanket, and a gurgling, groaning sound, as if he were in deep pain.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Been better,” he said. “I feel like that guy . . .”

  Who walks into the bar with a frog on his head, with a bird on his shoulder, with a kangaroo at his side and the bartender says, “Hey, we don’t get that many kangaroos in here,” and the kangaroo says, “Yeah, and at these prices you’re not likely to get many more!”

  And then he said, suddenly almost yelling, “Here!”

  And I pulled off the road.

  It wasn’t Edward’s Grove as far as I know, but it might as well have been. There was your old oak tree with the roots spreading out through the dark and mossy soil. There were your rhododendrons. There was your rabbit, hopping away at a leisurely gait, eyeing us with a backward glance. And there was your river, running clear the way you didn’t think rivers ran anymore, moving fast around stones the size of a small car, making little rapids, running as clear as the air, as blue as the sky, as white as a cloud.

  I don’t know how he saw it from beneath the blanket.

  “Carry me,” he said, or so it sounded, his voice so weak now I was doing my share of interpreting as I listened. He said, Carry me and You don’t know how I appreciate what you’re doing and When you see your mother, tell her—tell her I said good-bye. And so I carried him out of the car and down the mossy bank to the river and stood there before it, holding my father in my arms. And I knew what I was supposed to do then but I couldn’t do it. I just stood there, holding his body shrouded in a blanket on the banks of this river, until he told me, You might want to look away now and then Please, and all of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, impossible to hold on to even if I’d wanted to, and I wanted to. But then all I was holding was the blanket, because my father had jumped into the river. And that’s when I discovered that my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was just changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward in.

  All this time, my father was becoming a fish.

  I saw him dart this way and that, a silvery, brilliant, shining life, and disappear into the darkness of the deep water where the big fish go, and I haven’t seen him since—though others have. Already I’ve heard stories, of lives saved and wishes granted, of children carried for miles on his back, of anglers mischievously dumped from their vessels and emptied into various oceans and streams from Beaufort to Hyannis by the biggest fish they’ve ever seen, and they tell their stories to anybody who will listen.

  But no one believes them. No one believes a word.

  Acknowledgments

  I have a lot of friends and family members who in one way or another helped get this book written, and I thank them all here. My grat­itude extends especially to Paul Price, who has been a

  con­stant reader over the years, and Joe Regal, whose multifarious talents—agent, editor, singer, fri
end—make him an invaluable presence in my life. Walter Ellis and Betty Caldwell are two of the best teachers I’ve ever had, and without them I don’t know what might have become of me. And

  to Kathy Pories and everyone at Algon­quin, it has been a pleasure.

  Big Fish

  An Interview with the Author

  Questions for Discussion

  An Interview with the Author

  Although your first novel went on to great acclaim, the road to that success was not easy. What was the submission process like?

  Although this was to become my first published novel, I didn’t know that at the time. I’d written four or five novels before Big Fish, and the submission process for all of them was long and arduous — but there was no happy ending for those. I only mention these happily forgotten relatives of Big Fish because much about the submission process is forgotten once the book achieves its relatively modest and yet nearly impossible-to-achieve goal: a cover and a spine. But I think at least fifteen different publishers passed on the book before Algonquin decided to change my life and publish it.

  Many people have asked you about how this story might have paralleled your relationship with your own father. Would you talk about that, but also, how do you feel about readers’ desire to draw parallels between your fiction and your life?

  A few months after I finished the novel I allowed myself the distance on it to see how my own real life might have inspired it. I knew, of course, that the novel couldn’t have been written if I hadn’t been blessed by the mixed-blessing that was my father. (But aren’t all fathers — all parents — mixed blessings?) The father in the book, I discovered, shares many characteristics with the father in my real life. But during the process of writing the book I never asked or reflected: What would my father do if he were confronted by a giant? Instead I thought, What would Edward Bloom do? Edward Bloom is not my father, and the relationship his son has with him is not the same as the one I had with my father. The novel, I suppose any novel, uses the raw material of our mostly ordinary experiences and converts them into something that, the writer hopes, is compelling, of interest to someone else.

  Big Fish borders on sentimentality — but how could it not? It’s about death. So it makes sense that readers would assume the story I wrote was lifted directly from my own life’s plot. It wasn’t: though my father would die before the book was ever published, he was fine during its composition. It’s complicated: While on the one hand the book can and should be read and enjoyed without my own personal life explication, an author is, among other things, an actual person with an actual life. There’s no reason a reader shouldn’t wonder about that. But now the book and my father seem so distant to me that I have mixed up what’s real and what’s made-up. I’m pretty sure I’ve started making up stuff I think is real and fictionalizing, unbeknownst to me, things that really happened. We all do that, don’t we? Or is it just me?

  Big Fish has a rather unusual structure: it’s a collection of myths, replayed scenes, and a present-time narrative coursing through it all. How did you come up with this structure, and why?

  After years of trying, I realized I couldn’t write a linear narrative. That’s okay: I’m not good at writing sex scenes either, and one of the most important things to learn as a writer is what you can and what you can’t do, and how to avoid the things you can’t. I wrote the myths first, sort of like Edith Hamilton does in one of the best books in the world, Mythology. Big Fish told the story of a life, and it was a fun, adventurous story, but the reality behind the myths was missing. Why was this story being told at all? That’s when I inserted the death scenes. I wrote them all at the same time, as one scene, but then I realized there was too much information for one scene, so I cut it into pieces and sprinkled them throughout the book. They serve the purpose of grounding the myths in the real world with a real person telling them — a person who will die.

  The truth is, almost everything I do is accidental.

  Why do you think Edward Bloom is so driven to reinvent his life as “larger than life”? Does this reflect the way you see people’s conception of the trajectory of their lives and careers?

  No, I don’t think everyone wants to be larger than life — “a big fish in a little pond.” If they did, the pond would sure be crowded. Edward Bloom was an ambitious man; he was also charming, a lady-killer, funny. I don’t know if he actually achieved everything he dreamed of — most really ambitious people don’t — but as they say, it’s all in the journey.

  On the other hand, Edward Bloom is not just a man: he’s a mythic hero. He’s no different than Odysseus. My aim was to mythologize a contemporary man in the same way the ancients mythologized the “great men” of their time. It’s all fiction.

  There are really classic jokes that run throughout the book, and many happen to be ones that my own father tells. How did you choose them, and how do you see them functioning in the book?

  They are definitely not the jokes my father told. My father’s jokes were all playfully sexist, racist, in general demeaning, and offensive to somebody somewhere. The jokes I used in the book came from hours of research. My aim was to include jokes that had something to do either with death or with fathers and sons. They function in the book as a kind of palliative to the plot of a father who is dying, and the attendant grief the characters in the book and the reader should feel. Plus, who doesn’t like a good joke?

  Few writers have the opportunity to see their books being made into movies — and extremely successful ones at that. What was it like watching as your book was transformed into a script? I know that you’ve written screenplays yourself, but I’d like to hear about the differences between the two — what has to be sacrificed, and what has to be added.

  I loved it. Seeing my story transformed by someone (John August) who cared enough to do it and to do it well was, if nothing else, very flattering. Those of you who have seen the book and read the movie know how different they are. But this is a necessary and welcome difference. A dogmatic adherence to a novel’s narrative is the death knell for a movie; each form does things the other can’t, and a writer who doesn’t figure out what those differences are will be stuck doing neither well. There’s so much room in a novel, but there’s almost none in a screenplay. I mean, if a story is a house, a novel can be anything from a double-wide to a castle; a screenplay, as grand as its story might be, is usually a split-level. There’s no room for lingering for a long page or two on a woman’s face; you can’t take side trips to little towns outside of the narrative’s urban thrust. You can’t even present ideas that take time to puzzle over, because if you start puzzling in a movie, you’ve missed the next part and you only get more puzzled. I don’t think of the adaptation process as one in which anything is sacrificed any more than when my jeans are sacrificed for Bermuda shorts on a hot day.

  Can you talk about the two endings — the one for your novel, and the one for the film? How do you think that changed the message of the book, or our perspectives on Edward?

  There’s a coda in the film that’s not in the book: the characters from Ed Bloom’s stories appear at his funeral, and the viewer realizes that his incredible tales are based on real people; in the book there’s no funeral and there’s no explanation. The reader, if he thinks about it at all, has a choice to make, and either choice is right. It doesn’t really matter to me: the story is less about the truth of what happened than how each of us understands what’s true, if anything is, and what’s important for us to believe.

  What was it like being on the set of Big Fish and watching Tim Burton at work?

  So cool. My first movie set! Famous people I could talk to, many of whom even knew my novel existed. But watching a movie being filmed, when you have no part in the production of it, could not be more boring. They film the same thirty-second scene over and over for hours. After a late lunch and a rousing game of cricket with Ewan, Helena, and Albert, there’s not much else to do. I sound so jaded, don’t I? That’s what my
chauffeur tells me, anyway.

  Making a major motion picture based on a novel is one thing, but soon Big Fish will be a Broadway musical! How did this come about, and what are your thoughts about a musical stage adaptation?

  When the movie was being made, way back in 2003, the producers thought the story could be turned into a great Broadway musical, and over the years they’ve worked with John August and Andrew Lippa to write an amazing book and score. Everyone has had other projects that interrupted their progress on the musical, but it all really started to come together in 2011. Now it seems likely to play Broadway sometime in 2013. I never thought that this book would become a movie, but it became one, and now that it’s becoming a musical I’m starting to think there’s nothing it can’t do. If it had only gone to med school!

  Questions for Discussion

  1. William tells the story of his father through a series of tall tales. Why might tales that challenge the truth be a more effective way of getting to the heart of William’s father?

  2. Mythical heroes usually undertake a quest for an object or knowledge. What is Edward’s quest? What is William’s?

  3. How does Edward react to the role of becoming a father?

  4. How would you contrast William and Edward, especially in their understanding of storytelling?

  5. How would you characterize Edward and William’s relationship? In what ways does it change throughout the course of the book?

  6. Is there a specific tale here that seems to veer from the tone of the others? If so, in what way does that tale tell us more of what really happened? Does it matter what really happened? Why or why not?