Songs of the Humpback Whale

About Songs of the Humpback Whale

After a violent argument with her husband Oliver, Jane Jones loads her fifteen-year-old daughter Rebecca into a car and starts driving east. Oliver is a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has spent their marriage more absorbed by whale communication than by his family. Jane is heading to Massachusetts, to her brother Joley's apple farm, which she hasn't visited in years. The drive is also a reckoning—with her marriage, with what she has tolerated, with who she is when she stops organizing herself around what Oliver needs.

Originally published in 1992, Songs of the Humpback Whale is Picoult's debut novel, and it introduces what would become her signature structural device: multiple first-person narrators, each seeing the same events from a different vantage point. The five voices here—Jane, Oliver, Rebecca, Jane's brother Joley, and Rebecca's love interest Sam—tell the story in fragments that overlap and contradict, and notably, each narrator's chapters move in a different direction through time. Reconstructing the full chronology is part of what the reading experience demands.

The whale-song research that gives the novel its title is not incidental. Oliver's work studying humpback whale communication—the way whales modify their songs over time, the way a song spreads through a population until every whale in an ocean is singing a variation of the same melody—runs through the novel as both character detail and metaphor for how the people in the book try and fail to communicate across the distances between them.

Structure as Meaning

The decision to run some narratives forward and some backward through time is not a formal game. It means that the reader understands the ending of certain characters' stories before understanding their beginnings, and the beginning of other stories before seeing where they go. The emotional effect is of knowing, and not knowing, simultaneously—which is how the characters experience each other.

Rebecca is the novel's most developed character and the one whose coming-of-age the story ultimately serves. Her sections are the most consistently chronological, suggesting that her perspective is the one that the novel trusts most fully to organize itself.

Why Songs of the Humpback Whale Has Been Challenged

Songs of the Humpback Whale has been challenged in 1 state and 2 districts tracked in this catalog. Challenges cite domestic violence—which is depicted specifically and treated as the precipitating crisis it actually is—as well as language and some sexual content in the teenage subplot. The novel's frank treatment of a marriage in which one partner has been living with domestic violence for years, and finally leaves, is not a reason to restrict it; it is a reason it matters to readers who recognize that situation.