On Whale Island

April 8, 2002
In his previous book, My Old Man and the Sea, Hays and his father built a sailing boat and navigated around Cape Horn. Theirs was a heartfelt tale of adventure, family and the good old days. Hoping to pull those same heartstrings here, Hays places himself in a Walden-like wilderness. Bored with convention and surviving on diminishing royalty checks, Hays decides to move his family—wife, stepson, dogs and all—to the middle of nowhere for a year. Handily, he already owns a 50-acre wilderness called Whale Island, just off the coast of Nova Scotia and the perfect venue for such an enterprise. The text chronicles those 365 days (wife Wendy refused any more) and is as self-conscious as the move itself, comprising Hays's condescending accounts of his efforts to live deliberately, Thoreau-style, despite the objections of the Tupperware and latté-loving Wendy. Her own writings, and those of his son, are peppered throughout. Not that Hays thinks he is perfect—but he casts himself so enthusiastically as the wronged Woody Allen or John Kennedy Toole hero, he seems a self-perpetuating stereotype.

May 15, 2002
Owner of a 50-acre islet several hundred yards off Nova Scotia, and prosperous enough from sales of " My Old Man and the Sea "(1995) to go jobless for a year, Hays itched to ditch civilization for a stretch. His newlywed and her son agreed, and the family was soon chopping firewood, baking bread, collecting rainwater, and musing on nature. Idyllic? Hardly. The chief impression made by Hays' journal of their experience is how much the family turned inward, with Hays pensively writing about conflicts, arguments, and reconciliations galore, paralleled by his extolling the virtues of self-sufficiency and living by one's own rules. Like his Thoreauvian muse, Hays expresses disdain for the society from which he retreated. Mostly his denunciations, as of TV, are trite; more on point for readers is Hays' chronicle of island life's exigencies of storms or mechanical breakdowns and its rewards of sunrises and fresh lobster. An idiosyncratic record of family dynamics intensified by isolation and dominated by the stepson-stepfather angle.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)