When William Finnegan was struggling to write an article about the San Francisco surf scene in the 1980s he found himself “wondering how much of the thing I could hope to convey to outsiders”. Having taken a full seven years to complete, the novella-length piece was eventually published in the New Yorker, where it quickly gained classic status among surfers and readers alike – the two are stereotypically if not mutually exclusive. To this fully qualified outsider – I live by the ocean without ever having set thigh in it, but I have seen Point Break three times – Barbarian Days gradually assumes the form of a hefty masterpiece.
Finnegan learned to surf in southern California but got his big break after his dad’s work took the family to Hawaii in 1966. Then 13, Bill was soon spending all his free time in the ocean, where “everything… was disturbingly interlaced with everything else”. The same is true of the book. While learning to harness the violence of the waves, Bill is constantly getting into racialised fights at and after school. Corporal punishment at home is the norm, making him conscious, in retrospect, “of the ambient low-grade violence I lived in as a mid-century child”. He won’t claim it toughened him up, but it perhaps prepared him for his adult life reporting from war zones and, in Cold New World, from the frontline of American poverty. In the ocean, there are plenty of occasions when he is, in the surfer’s lexicon, rag-dolled, held under or axed by the wave’s lip. Routine injuries merit barely a mention until, in Australia in 1978, he looks around and sees, as if in a mirror, how he is “destroying” his body through surfing. “I had no interest in any of this at the time. All I wanted from my body was for it to paddle faster and surf better.”
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