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This Hawaii-set novel has its moments but a series of errors will leave surfers tearing their hair.

The Old Man and waves he’s ridden, but these moments of mild displeasure are never enough to harsh his buzz.

His buzz does get seriously harshed one rainy night, however, when he hits a man on a bike while driving home from a bar with Olive.

As Sharkey sees it, he’s simply “killed a drunk homeless guy” and the police don’t seem too bothered about the dead man either, or about the fact that Sharkey had been drinking.

After the accident, though, Sharkey’s charmed existence starts to crumble, and Olive becomes convinced that the only way for him to get his life back on track is find out more about the man he killed, as a means of coming to terms with what he has done.

In many respects, it’s a set-up that allows Theroux to write about what he knows: for some years now, he’s divided his time between Cape Cod and Hawaii, so he’s familiar with the islands; and, while he isn’t a surfer, he is an experienced kayaker (Exhibit A: his 2006 book The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific), so he is familiar with the ocean, if not necessarily with the dynamics of breaking waves.

At the core of Under the Wave at

Waimea, however, is surfing, and evidently this is not a subject Theroux properly understood before, during or after writing the novel.

Writers who care about a subject typically obsess over the details, but it’s here that Theroux falls short, to the extent that – certainly for any surfers reading

– the constant glitches will prove hairtearingly distracting.

It’s the errors that show a lack of