Remarkably Bright Creatures is a best selling novel that is apparently being turned into a movie starring Sally Field. I’m sure it will be very sweet because the story is cute/nice/sweet — choose your bland compliment. It was fine and a quick read, but I just didn’t love it. The character development (or lack thereof) was probably the biggest obstacle for me, and that issue contributed to a pretty thin plot in places.
The story is told by three narrators. Cameron Cassmore is a 30-year-old man-baby. I think we are supposed to like him but he is immature and annoying. Cameron never knew his father and was abandoned by his mother when he was nine. Aunt Jeanne raised him and while Cameron is very smart, he is also a screw up who can’t hold a job and is in debt. When given a box of his mother’s stuff, he decides, based on a photo and a ring, that he is going to go north from California to Sowell Bay, Washington, to find the man he thinks is his father and maybe get rich. Tova Sullivan is a 70-year-old widow in Sowell Bay whose son Erik died tragically when he was a teenager. Tova’s husband passed away a few years ago, and she spends her time with her lifelong female friends and working evenings at the local aquarium, where she cleans after hours. Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus who is coming to the end of his life at the aquarium, and he is the third narrator. Marcellus is highly intelligent; he sees and understands much more than people do, and he has formed an attachment to Tova, who feels an attachment to Marcellus as well.
Once Cameron arrives in Sowell Bay, various tensions arise. Cameron needs to make some money if he is going to spend time there hunting for his father, so he ends up working at the aquarium and living adjacent to the local grocer, a Scotsman named Ethan. Cameron also finds himself falling for a local woman named Avery. Meanwhile, Tova’s friends, for reasons that don’t make a whole lot of sense to me, are all up in arms at the thought of her selling her house and moving to a retirement community even though some of them are doing similar things. And Ethan, we discover, has a crush on Tova even though she’s about as lively as a wet rag. Honestly, the way she is described, Tova basically says little to anyone about anything. Certainly the untimely death of her son 30 years ago had enormous impact on her life, but I think the reader is expected to fill in the blanks there rather than the author showing us what happened to Tova, her husband, and their small community in the aftermath. Cameron and Tova form an unexpected bond through Marcellus, who is edging closer to death and trying desperately to show Cameron and Tova what is pretty obvious to the rest of us.
It’s fine. The story is fine, it’s inoffensive and a decent diversion if you want to read something that won’t depress you or take too much time.
