Shark Dialogues: A Confused Piece of Fiction
Shark Dialogues is a novel about a multigenerational family. It focuses on Pono, and four of her grandchildren. We are given the story of Pono’s struggles through life, and how she must decide whether to tell her children her life story, or to keep her promise with her leper lover Duke to conceal his existence. “This homecoming doubly urgent, for Pono had summoned her… Still, it was too soon for Pono to die. Too many questions unanswered, too many mysteries unsolved” (Davenport 9). This is the conflict that is set up in the beginning of the book. Pono has a secret that she has kept even from her children, that her grandchildren are aching to know. What the author does is create the conflict early on. In turn, it becomes a larger part of the whole story. However, when the conflict reaches its climax, as with the mini-conflicts introduced, the book’s audience is left with the same struggle as the people in Pono’s life. A seemingly significant moment is built up then leaves readers with a feeling of the story being unfinished as each of the conflict’s climactic points are underwhelming.
Davenport wants to do everything with her book. She covers more than a hundred years of history and focuses in on the thoughts of her point of view characters. She covers a hundred years in a hundred pages, yet she dwells on the thoughts of Ming, in just a moment, for an entire chapter. As Katherine Min put it in her review of Shark Dialogues, “The excesses of the novel are the excesses of the epic… her determination to work on as large a canvas as possible, to include everything, and to spend it all” (Min). The reader is led through the horrible story of Pono, the years at the cannery, her years as a coolie, the murder of her rape baby, and know that every story is something that Pono never told, something that the girls are dying to know. “The kitchen was where they discovered their real history… ‘Dat missin’ fingah on yoah tutu’s hand, from pineapple sliceah at Dole Cannery’” (Davenport 7). All the while we are kept wondering what comes next. We wonder why it is that she cannot tell her story. As stated by E.M. Forster this becomes relevant because “we want to know what happens next. That is the universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be the story” (Forster 27).
The audience is left wondering how the conflict within Pono will be resolved. Will she tell the girls and reunite her family or will she choose not to, and live alone with her secrets? What is lost that readers are expecting is a character arc from Pono. A character arc, as described by writing instructor K.M. Weiland, goes like this:
1. The protagonist starts one way.
2. The protagonist learns some lessons throughout the story.
3. The protagonist ends in a (probably) better place.
A character arc takes many forms. Certainly, Pono chooses the first path. She decides to take the girls to Duke. She says “There are women locked in my womb forever, the memory of their birth. All I can do now is liberate the fruit of their wombs. And it may be too late” (Davenport 322). In this scene Pono is wondering if telling the girls will go alright. She has already decided to tell the girls. The climactic moment when Pono struggles with herself, deciding whether she should betray Duke or honor him, is completely skipped over. This missed opportunity is the key moment when the reader can see Pono struggling to change. Pono, who is at first stubborn, becomes someone completely different in the blink of an eye because the conflict set up at the beginning of the novel is replaced with the second and third climactic moments, where Pono tells the girls, and when the family confronts Duke. Davenport misses the Dramatic moment, instead choosing to write a book much like a Shakespearean play where action takes place offstage.
Not only does Davenport skip over the climax but we also later learn, through Ming, that the secret of Duke was all a facade to begin with. Davenport had hidden the fact that Ming knew. She had kept a secret from her cousins all along and though she was the voice of integrity that all the cousins looked to, she was unconcerned with the plot of the story all along. Years ago, Ming “took the boat to Moloka’i, the leper settlement. I watched him from a distance for hours… Did you think my father could forget his childhood here? This house… the rumors…” (Davenport 309). In trying to make a plot twist, and in order to push Pono into changing her ways, Davenport decides to leave out crucial information. “When it comes out, we do get a good plot thrill, but too much at the expense of character… That she stoops to suppress [her character] is a little distressing” (Forster 93). This quote was taken from Forster talking about a book called Villette by Charlotte Bronte, in an identical case, where the author deliberately leaves out crucial information. Not letting us know until almost the end of the book, page 309, that one of the girls knew Pono’s secret undermines the main conflict of the entire story. The idea of the secret seems a fabrication. If the information was so easily accessible to Ming, then why was it so hard for generations of other smart women to figure it out?
When the girls finally get their answers, the second climax of the book, where Pono reveals her history to the girls, Davenport again misses the climactic moment. Davenport leads up to the moment, building the tension. Vanya is able to voice the feelings that all the girls have, “Why should we believe you?” and Run Run begins to cry (Davenport 326). This should be a big moment again. This is the moment all the girls have been waiting for. Instead of going into the inner turmoils of each character, Davenport decided to recount through Pono’s mouth, a history we have already read. Retelling the story we have already read does not contribute to the plot, for as Forster says, “Characters must not brood too long, they must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides, they must contribute, or higher interests will be jeopardised” (Forster 85). Pono’s retelling of her story, rather than contributing to the tension of the moment, takes away from the tension. Davenport decides to scope out, and skip the inner turmoil of both Pono, and the girls, which up until then she had been playing into heavily. Instead, on the next page, we get, “She was quiet for a while… she felt magisterial ease… she looked at her granddaughters, and they had changed somewhat, in their faces sorrow, wide-eyed calm. Their bodies now were flung in attitudes of listening” (Davenport 328). Over the course of one page, a page without any insight into how the characters react, without any further fighting, or questioning, the sceptical and untrusting girls give in and the conflict is resolved.
Davenport, somewhere along the way, became overly focused on the grand scheme of things. She forgot to clue us in to the moments where we want to be with them the most, the moment where we need to see what goes through their heads, the moment where all their doubts and fears are turned into love and admiration for Pono is glossed over. The moment where Pono realizes that she needs to betray Duke in order to save her girls is lost somewhere in the pages. And in trying to write about everything, Davenport forgets the characters at the heart of her story.
Works Cited
Davenport, Kiana. Shark Dialogues. New York: Atheneum ;, 1994. Print.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel,. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. Print.
Min, Katherine. “Shark Dialogues.” Ploughshares 20.⅔ (!994): 241.Academic Search Premier. Web. 5. Feb. 2015.
Weiland, K.M. "Creating Stunning Character Arcs, Pt. 1: Can You Structure Characters? - Helping Writers Become Authors." Helping Writers Become Authors. 9 Feb. 2014. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. <http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2014/02/character-arcs-1.html>.
