why fish don't exist

starting off this blog with the last read of the year. (inversion is always fun!) i read why fish don’t exist by lulu miller in what was basically two sittings, one while battling insomnia and the other the following evening. overall review: 8/10, generally excellent with some portions and creative decisions that i’m not the most partial to. or mostly just conflicted about.

the basic premise of the book follows an interwoven narrative between the author’s tumultuous life and the life story of david starr jordan, a scientist who named and identified hundreds of fish. eventually it also features discussion of taxonomy and philosophy, thus the title of the book.

it’s gorgeously written (for the most part!) with the kind of casual but artistic narration i love best in nonfiction. in runs into some cliche near-midwest emo sounding phrasing sometimes, especially in the more generalised and self-reflective portions, but it’s honestly charming and felt very genuine. the historical aspects are woven together in a way that is engaging and sensible: though sometimes you might get impatient with the autobiographical interruptions. they never go on TOO long.

i’d urge anyone reading this review to just pick the book up any way they can. it’s about 300 pages on my huge text epub copy, and only around 200 in print. the conversational tone is easy to read. it’s not dense at all like some nonfiction can be. i’d really recommend it to anyone. there’s a couple of twists in the stories that i think are best experienced cold.

alright. we’ve all finished it? now i can air out my minor misgivings.

when i logged the book on goodreads i accidentally got lost in the negative reviews and the first one i saw bemoaned the fact that the author spent too much time on jordan as a luminary figure and not enough on his eugenicist ideology, and as someone who was already aware of it, they felt like miller was ‘whining’ about having to cancel an idol. and presumed it to be the crux of the book. now i disagree with that assessment and i don’t think it devalues the narrative — it’s not an author’s job to handhold and betray a dramatic narrative with the presumption you won’t finish their book — but it did raise some important questions in my mind that i wanted to exercise, let’s say.

first, i don’t agree entirely with the ‘cancel’ comment. we’re clearly meant to follow miller’s own personal thoughts and she does a very good job at presenting jordan in a good light specifically to strip that away. i think it’s done very well. but i do see how it can be grating to have to sift through the extended thoughts of a white woman being sad that her favorite old white man is a racist. i’ve known plenty of people who have felt the need to atone to imaginary brown people (or worse, me, a tangible brown person) and a lot of the time it can be self-centered and focused more on the disappointment someone feels instead of the actual harm their ‘problematic’ idol has caused. that being said i think miller gives it a lot of grace and distinctly acknowledges how this idolising is unhealthy. i think there’s a degree of self-disgust and awareness you’re supposed to tap into and in a way, i think her approach would definitely make people with a surface level knowledge on the topic more critical of jordan. i think if the book started off decrying him as a eugenicist and going into the history of the movement, it would’ve been a less accessible read — or at least i’d be more hesitant to pick it up, unsure of what knowledge i’d need as a prerequisite. i’m sure this applies to a lot of others. so ultimately i don’t mind this mixup.

second, as an extension of that point… i do feel conflicted about the sort of bait-and-switch narrative about the women in the colony. i think it’s good the book highlights these stories, and evidently the women themselves were comfortable enough with it. however my mind can’t help but shake the ethical dilemma of hiding these stories within the external fabric of david starr jordan. i’m often really critical of art (especially live performances!) that encases commentary and political awareness in pseudo-generic fact retellings that depend on you being unaware of greater societal problems. i see it a lot in narratives about race — first we must gesture towards the racist imagery, and then we talk about how it’s bad, actually. a lot of it is done under the approach of the audience not being a part of a minority group. even if the subject matter is directly about them.

i kind of get that with this ‘subplot’ though obviously less about being condescending and more about the unfortunate consequence of only giving voice to victims of violence by first giving voice to their oppressors. i think miller did a good job of ‘deplatforming’ jordan and setting up his early racist and ableist inclinations, so it’s not as bad as the aforementioned example. and again the women were in full conversation with miller and consented to inclusion. i think it’s just the author in me that is fascinated by how exactly to navigate sympathy in an audience, and how much the ‘skeleton’ of your writing impacts the messaging.

otherwise, the end focusing on the philosophical categorisation of fish and proximity to humanity started to get a bit grating. just a bit. i don’t like it when people equate humanity to animals, not because it’s not true, but because it’s often done to justify carelessness and lack of accountability. miller doesn’t do this too much, thankfully. but there is a lot of ‘blood cup’ about how it’s impossible and foolish to define fish as a category — which miller does acknowledge as silly, somewhat? at least includes an anecdote about how it’s still a useful categorical term to most people. and i think there we just get tangled in the ever-confusing web of convenience in linguistics and how direct etymology and traditional usage doesn’t really dictate how words ‘should’ be used. for example: most people know that ‘a couple’ technically means two, but it’s often used for a general ‘small amount’ of things. i don’t think the philosophical quandary of why people don’t use it correctly all the time is all that intriguing, really — humans just love convenience.

though i’ve only really mentioned the negatives in depth, they’re nitpicks that i mostly only notice because the book is written in a way that resonates with me, and because it’s so close to being a perfect 10/10 that it’s impossible not to mention these flaws. it was definitely up there as one of my favorite reading experiences of the year though. it makes me want to dig around for more nonfiction, which i’ve really been trying to read more of, as of late.