Book Review: Gann's The Wager
Being a review of Dad Lit master David Gann's New Book About Sailors and Stuff
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
I’ve written book reviews for years and years and over that time have started to use the term “Dad Lit” to refer to a subgenre of books I, and many other straight male dads, enjoy. On the nonfiction side, this tends towards the narrative nonfiction, both the historical, Empire of the Summer Moon, and the contemporaneous, Bad Blood. On the fiction side, think Lee Child. Someday I’ll write an essay clearly defining the genre, but for now, let me tell you David Gann’s new book, The Wager is a strong new example of the genre.
Gann is the author of other notable Dad Lit bangers, including the classic of the genre, Killers of the Flower Moon about the murder for money of a number of members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. His books hit all the right notes. A decent backstory of history, compelling characters and a propulsive narrative arc. Just the kind of thing a dad like me wants to dig into after a long day at the little league fields.
His latest tells the story of the shipwreck of the Wager. There’s some good context setting with a short history of the British navy, The War of Jenkins' Ear (I hadn’t heard of it either!) and an overview of the strict class and rank hierarchy of a British naval vessel. All that is handled quickly and soon our protagonists are on a rocky coast, with little hope for rescue. This is where the book becomes a classic example of that subgenre of dad lit — dudes suffering. There are many fine examples of this subgenre, Into the Wild, and In the Kingdom of Ice, books where, usually because of their own hubris and ill-fated desire for adventure, men find themselves in horrific conditions, trying to survive.
Why is the coddled contemporary dad so drawn to such stories? Are we living a more adventurous life vicariously through these books? Does it give us the inspiration to make one more trek to the drug store for children’s ibuprofen? Probably a bit of both. Either way, the Wager fits right in with its gut-wrenching discussions of the depravations the men of the Wager endured, and how class, and in some cases, race, played into those depravations and how the men handle them. You’ve got shoddy rafts, problematic interactions with native people (Gann more than many dad lit writers calls out the racism and colonialism of his protagonists), starvation and mutiny.
The plot races ahead in a way that kept me deeply engaged and forgetting, for at least a couple of hours, about everything else I needed to do. Sometimes we read for education, sometime for pure escape. The best of dad lit weaves these two together into something vaguely edifying but more importantly, engaging. The Wager definitely fits that bill.
Recommended.