"I mean, look: sure, you can call me complicit, but there’s complicit and complicit, isn’t there? It isn’t only one label than explains everything in every situation. There isn’t complicity but complicities, errors of different sizes, plus there are other factors, choices that in hindsight maybe weren’t right, but in the moment it seemed different. Other people have done a lot worse things. Pol Pot. Drug cartels. Sex traffickers."
Suzanne Flaherty is the first-person narrator and protagonist of this novel. She is recently divorced from a husband sent to jail for financial crimes. One of the non-punishable of which is having left Suzanne without a soft cushion to land on. So she lands hard and starts the second act of her life and it is much harder. It is not the crime of which she is a victim that has led to this moment of self-reflection, but the ones that demand jail time. The rationalization above is a direct response to those who look at her with the suspicion that the wife always knows what the husband is up to. Even, or maybe even especially, when those things are criminal and involve ripping off others. This explanation of the title comes too early in the story to know exactly what she means by having done things not as bad as the Cambodian despot who initiated a genocide thought to have killed at least a million people. Such a comparison leaves a lot of room for speculation.
"The whale's tail moved, and I felt it, like a shock, in my breastbone: it was alive. This rare creature, so gargantuan, wanted to live. What were the intervals supposed to be between spoutings? Was it breathing too fast or too slow? I tensed, waiting for it to spout again, counting the seconds...To know that something that big was trying to live—it was nearly unbearable to wait for its next massive breath."
Unrelated, at least narratively, to the narrator's marital situation and her ex-husband's life since being released from prison is the story of the whale. It comes as no great secret that a whale is going to show up in Suzanne's story. Three of the novel's four parts bear subtitles that contain the word "whale." It is a particularly rare species facing serious threat of extinction in the near future. The whale beaches itself and proceeds to expire and since there is no profitable way of dealing with such an event, Suzanne's strange obsession with the animal extends through the process of rotting into a carcass. Despite Suzanne's conviction that the whale clearly wants to live, it is the big mammal's death and the aftermath that keeps drawing her. For reasons she is not even sure of, but that have something to with seeking redemption for her complicities.
"For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had never felt so competent. I knew right away that I could this. I could help people this way. It was exhilarating and it just flowed. I flowed. I knew that I was where I was supposed to be, at last."
This is the kind of thing that seems like it would come at the end of a story. In fact, it arrives fairly early. What she is describing, the place where she has found herself, is her brand-new life as a massage therapist. The only problem is that she does not have a license, except for the one she printed up herself. As she explains, she doesn't have time to do the work to get the license when it is crystal clear from the return customers that she already knows what she is doing. And, besides, she knows that the massage table is exactly where she is supposed to be. This decision goes to illustrate that Suzanne's wrongs do not extend merely to being complicit in the actions of others. Which may be why she is compelled to visit that rotting whale seeking some sort of redemption.
