Remarkably Bright Creatures

I was absolutely delighted by Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (2022)! I am happily in the majority of people who loved this book, the story of widowed Tova Sullivan who lost her teenage son Erik thirty years before, and Cameron, annoying screw-up, man-child, who shows up in Sowell Bay, Washington, looking for his real estate baron father (his mother left him to live with his aunt when he was young), and the Great Pacific Octopus, Marcellus, who both Tova and Cameron meet at the aquarium where Tova works.

Chapters generally alternated between Tova’s, Cameron’s, and Marcellus’s perspectives. Van Pelt had me immediately when Marcellus’s chapter began with the number “date of his captivity.” The actor Michael Urie (Drama Desk winner, Ugly Betty, Single All the Way) was the audiobook narrator for Marcellus’s chapters. He read in a haughty, highly educated, professor-type voice, and was superb! I’ve not found any interviews with him about this performance–I would love to hear his perspective about acting in the voice of this singular octopus.

Tova lives in the house her father built, in the grief she has nursed for thirty years since Erik disappeared into Puget Sound his senior year of high school, and no one ever found out what happened. She takes great pride in cleaning the aquarium every night, despite being past the age most people have retired. She doesn’t need the money, she just needs to keep busy. One day she finds Marcellus on the loose in the director’s office, scavenging the trash for take-out Chinese food. She helps him get back to his tank–he has carefully monitored how many minutes he can be outside of the water without “consequences” but sometimes things don’t go his way. He knows how many sea cucumbers he can take each day without being noticed, but he is surprised by the assistance Tova gives him, since he has little respect for most humans. So begins their friendship.

Cameron lives in Modesto, California, with his girlfriend, and has lost his most recent job, when she throws his stuff out the window, so he has to decamp to his best friends’ couch. When he takes some of his stuff from her to help her declutter, he finds things of his Mom’s which give him a clue of who his father might be. So he sets off to Sowell Bay, Washington, to try to find him and make a claim for some of the support he never got. What he finds in Sowell Bay is a small community, with Ian the Scottish grocery store owner who got there with a girlfriend and never left, Terry, the aquarium owner, Avery, the paddle shop owner, and Tova, the aquarium cleaning lady.

How Marcellus brings these two together and makes sure that they know the truth is pretty amazing. I know it’s fiction, with magical realism/ fabulist elements, but I absolutely loved it and wanted to believe that Marcellus could understand everything that Van Pelt ascribed to him. We don’t know what octopuses know since their reality is so much different than ours (see An Immense World by Ed Yong) but I wanted to believe that Marcellus is possible. For even more information about octopuses, read The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, which my book group read several years ago and loved.

There was no anti-fatness that I can recall, so I would consider it weight-neutral.