Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
(Simon & Schuster, $26)
Lulu Miller’s first book is “no ordinary fish tale,” said Hanh Nguyen in Salon.com. Part memoir, part biography of a forgotten scientist, Why Fish Don’t Exist begins by indulging an obsession Miller developed some years ago with David Starr Jordan, an early 20th-century ichthyologist who was the founding president of Stanford University. The initial appeal was an anecdote that made him seem either a fool or an exemplar of resilience: When the Bay Area was rocked by the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and jars of his vast collection were smashed, he tried to salvage his work by picking up the fish one by one and sewing name tags to them. But Jordan had a dark side, and Miller’s account becomes “a wild ride,” the suspense growing as each revelation about the man “becomes more appalling than the last.”
Miller’s life did prove instructive—“just not in the way Miller had hoped,” said Kevin Canfield in the Chicago Review of Books. Yes, he had responded creatively to adversity of the kind Miller herself was facing: Having quit a dream job as an on-air contributor to NPR’s Radiolab and destroyed a long-term relationship by cheating on her boyfriend, Miller was reeling with shame and self-doubt. But she soon learned that Jordan became a leading eugenicist who advocated the forced sterilization of a range of “unfit” peoples. And just a year before the earthquake, he had done something even more surprising. When his university’s co-founder Jane Stanford died of strychnine poisoning, he successfully intervened to cover up the murder.
Radiolab fans will recognize many of Miller’s methods, said Christoph Irmscher in The Wall Street Journal. We get the staccato sentences, the self-irony, the authorial epiphanies. But Miller is a master of the form, and she gives Jordan his comeuppance when she finally explains her title: Even fish resisted his impulse to categorize, because many of the creatures we call fish are not related in evolutionary terms. Miller, who also reveals her long battle with depression, even finds new hope through her journey. “What a delightful book.”