by Jon Adams, Slack Water Press, 978-0-9797613-0-0

This month we’re reading The Cruise of the Jest by Jon Adams. The book came to me several months ago in the standard self-published package: uninspired cover, folder with press release and other stuff inside, etc. (Just so you know, we do not look at press kits – they go straight into the trash. A press release, however – a single piece of paper with book stats and blurb – is a must.)

Anyway, as I’ve probably said before, I look at everything. And while the cover was painfully plain, it was not atrocious. And the internal layout was perfectly decent.

Then, there was the content page. Wow.

San Francisco Bay 3
Half Moon Bay 10
Ensenada 20
Cabo San Lucas 27
Mazatlán 38
Tres Marias 49
Acapulco 53
Nuku Hiva 62
Tahiti 76

There are a lot more. In fact, the destinations lead all the way around the world. Well, of course. The Cruise of the Jest.

On to the first page:

He was waiting to find out what Jack wanted him to do next. Jack told him to be on Jest at ten that morning. He didn’t want to be early, so he was lying in his bed, listening to the radio. He was thinking that ten was an odd time. Usually when Jack wanted him to do something, it was more like six in the morning or eight in the evening, dawn or dusk. Back in the summer, the last time Jack told him to be on Jest, it had been eight in the evening. That was when Jack told him to sail Jest down to Half Moon Bay. Jack said he would be there, at the harbor in half Moon Bay, waiting for him when he came in. But it hadn’t happened that way.

Nothing quite happens the way you expect it to, except when it does. And what happens the second time he sails to Half Moon Bay is completely different than what happens the first time.

The Cruise of the Jest is a completely extraordinary piece of classic coming-of-age literature. It is so outstanding that I’m shocked, dismayed, scandalized that no publisher – independent or otherwise – would look at it. Please, do more than look at it. Read it. And give it to your kids to read. And give it to your dads. And your grandfathers.

Below, you’ll find some questions and answer sessions that Mr. Adams and I exchanged through email.

One other thing: Mr Adams has invested in a new book cover.

Q: You have indicated that The Cruise of the Jest is based on your own experience. Could you say a little more about that?

A: Yes, my parents took us (me, my two brothers and my sister) on a world cruise. In 1961 we left San Francisco on the 58-foot schooner Fairweather. We sailed west across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, then up the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. From there we sailed across the Atlantic and Caribbean, passed through the Panama Canal, and then, after four years, returned to San Francisco. But the novel is not entirely based on my own experience. My mother kept a journal during the cruise, a journal that I later inherited. The writing of The Cruise of the Jest actually came about when I began transcribing and editing my mother’s journal because I realized that the journal didn’t tell a story—journals rarely do. And I knew if I wanted to describe what it was like to sail around the world, I needed a story. I think this need for a story is an example of fiction being more believable, and certainly more compelling, than simply telling the facts of what happened. The facts of what happened have their own place in the corridors of one’s experience, but it takes a story to convey that experience to others.

Q: So in addition to your own experience you had your mother’s journal to rely on. How much of the journal is in the novel?

A: My mother’s journal was very useful for many of the details that I used. But even when I used details from the journal, I transformed them according to fit the needs of the story. Let me give an example from the journal, and then the parallel scene from the novel. This example involves Tiriki, an Islander from a small atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago.

[journal]

August 24 [1961]—Manihi. We are leaving Manihi for Rangiroa, a hundred miles away. The girls in the village told me everyone will cry when we leave, but we left in such a hurry during slack water that there was to time for tears. We have a new crew member, Tiriki, one of the young men of the island. Like all the men on these far away atolls, his dream is to go to Tahiti and get himself a big fat wife.

August 26—at sea. It blew hard all night and all day. We arrived at the pass in Rangiroa after sunset and remembering Takaroa, we hove-to for the night. The storm continued into the night and by morning it had blown us so far to leeward that we decided to set our course for Tahiti. Sailing under jib and stormsail and making seven knots. Poor Tiriki is seasick.

August 29—Tahiti. The pilot boat met us outside the reef and led us through the pass. We moored stern-to at the quay in front of the Papeete. Everything below was completely soaked. Drying out came later. First we had to try the Hinano, the famous beer of Tahiti.

In the morning I asked Tiriki to come shopping with me, hoping that in this way I could get him to do some cooking. But this was his first time away from Manihi, and he wanted to put on his new clothes. It seems that Verne [one of the crew] gave Tiriki some of his old clothes. I waited on deck, and when Tiriki joined me, I didn’t know what to say. He had such a happy grin on his face. He was wearing a white shirt with a tie and a pair of boxer shorts. So that’s the way we went shopping. In the evening he went to the outdoor movie wearing a sport coat and the pair of boxer shorts again. No one has the heart to tell him that his clothes were not fashionable.

[novel]

As Skip walked back, he saw that Walker was still in Viama’s, now drinking Hinano beer. He wanted to find out what happened to Eddie, so he asked Walker about the Polynesian on the Dolphin. Walker said, “That’s Tiriki. I picked him up in Mahini and brought him to Papeete so he could find a big, fat wife. I assumed he could speak French because every time I said something to him he said, ‘Oui, Papa.’ I also assumed that he could cook—he said, ‘Oui, Papa’ when I asked him—but I never found out whether he could or not because he was seasick all the way from Mahini. Aside from that, Tiriki is a wonderful fellow, the only fellow I know who smiles even when he’s seasick.”

Just then, Les joined them and began talking about the destruction of Tahiti. “Captain Cook said on his first visit—no, his second visit—that the white man had ruined Tahiti. And look here at the example.” He gestured to Tiriki who was walking by. Actually he was strutting by, with an immense smile on his face. Les was referring to how he was dressed. Walker had given Tiriki some old clothes and Tiriki had cast off his pareu and T-shirt and put on a white dress shirt with a black tie. He also had on a pair of white boxer shorts—and nothing else.

“But this does not illustrate ruin. Tiriki is displaying, like his forefathers, his incorruptible simplicity and naturalness. And before you call him naïve, consider whether his simplicity is not also a natural satire of our own mode of dress. As soon as we reach the tropics and begin to ‘go native,’ the first symbol of civilization that we discard is the wearing of underwear. It is uncomfortable, unnecessary, and probably unsanitary. Tiriki is not only adapting our cast-off symbols of civilization, he is rubbing our noses in the display of our loss.”

I hope this gives at least a glimpse of how fact is transformed into fiction. The facts in the journal and novel are more or less the same, but in the novel, Tiriki’s behavior becomes more than a fact. He is, in a minor way, a symbol of cultural conflict and change. This is absent in the journal.

Q: You have used a number of haiku. What do you see as their main purpose in the novel?

A: I knew that using haiku in the novel was a risk. First of all, I had to actually write them, and second, haiku is not something that is usually associated with sailing. But I wanted to suggest that Skip, the sixteen-year-old main character, has some facility with language, for there are times when his language might otherwise seem surprisingly sophisticated. Also, I wanted to compensate for the rather spare and non-metaphorical style of the novel. The haiku, I hope, suggest a poetic aspect that is inherent in the sea.

Q: In reference to style, maybe you could talk about this statement: “The truth is wondrous when presented in the style of wonder....”

A: I didn’t write that. Skip wrote that in a letter to impress the mother of the girl he is pursuing. In the letter he makes a sly comparison between himself and Odysseus. Homer’s Odyssey seems wondrous in part because Odysseus visited strange countries, such as the land of the Lotus-eaters. Skip says he also visited strange countries. In Tahiti he saw an Islander carrying a pig on his back, which could be described—in the style of wonder—as a land where pigs ride men.

Q: Didn’t you worry about the 60s music references bouncing off the heads of contemporary readers?

A: Like most writers, I worried about many things, but I thought I could get away with some of them if I just didn’t over do it. Mainly, I wanted to use rock and roll for want it meant to my generation: it was the poetry of teenage romance. At the same time, the references to rock and roll are part of the 60s setting of the novel, along with the political references to John F. Kennedy, and the technological references to wooden boats and canvass sails. I think that any story, except perhaps fantasy, needs to be embedded in the details of its historical or social context. This is an important part of what we think of as a story’s realism.

Q: Why did you decide to publish your novel yourself, and what has you experience as a publisher been like?

A: I tried to get published at an established publishing house, but I couldn’t get anyone to actually read the manuscript, let alone publish it. I spent over a year trying to get various literary agents to read it, but without success. I then tried a few small literary presses that accept manuscripts. And finally, since the novel is about the sea, I tried the publishers of sea and maritime books. I think this is a common story of writers who turn to self-publishing.

I then looked at the subsidiary publishers, such as Lulu and Booksurge. But the more I looked, the more I realized that subsidiary publishers mainly do the easy part of publishing, the part that I felt I could do myself (It is not hard to get a block of ISBNs). While the hard part, such as copyediting and promotion, I would have to do myself in any case.

Plus, I realized that I wanted to have control of publishing process. For example, I knew what I wanted the interior layout to look like. The Cruise of the Jest is about sailing around the world and the chapters—there are 29 of them—are named after the ports where Jest stops. I wanted those port names in the running headers (and I wanted them is small caps). In other words, I see the layout as part of the rhetoric of the story itself.

Being both writing and publisher is a major advantage of self-publishing. I think of this as the “director’s cut effect.” It is often little things, but in publishing little things matter, especially when they begin to add up. For example, the novel includes the names of many boats, not just Jest, but also the Astrolabe, the Oceanid, and about fifteen to twenty more. While copy editing, I noticed that sometimes I preceded the name of a boat with “the” and sometimes I didn’t. At first I tired to decide which form is correct, but then I decided that the two forms have very slightly different nuances. Jest is like a character in the story, so like a character it’s name is not preceded with “the.” All the other boats are just boats, they get a “the” in front of their name. This is the type of decision that I think only a writer/publisher is in a position to make.