Book Review: Man Overboard! by Kathleen Rooney

Here’s what happens in Man Overboard!: a man falls (or jumps) over the side of a cruise ship; he treads water for 20 hours; while treading water he thinks about his life. That’s it. If you think that sounds like a pointless and stupid premise for a novel, you’d be spectacularly wrong, but also probably not the reader this novel deserves. If you want to see how a writer could pull off this premise without it being pointless and stupid, you should read the book.

Patrick ‘Kick’ Kilpatrick is 33, a former competitive swimmer, a physical therapist/fitness instructor, and, since ‘[f]alse modesty’s pointless… a stud. A hunk.’ He’s also alone, having probably shattered several bones in his feet when they made contact with the water after falling from the side of a cruise ship the night before Thanksgiving. Over the next 20 hours, Patrick tries not to die. In trying not to die he realises just how much he wants to live and how poorly he was living before.

Crucially, Patrick dwells on his massive mommy issues. They’re fair enough: he hasn’t spoken to the mother he very plainly adored and continues to adore since she walked out on the family when he was 10, after having miraculously recovered from a cancer everyone believed to be terminal. But he also hasn’t done anything about it, even though his mother has recently reached out. Hand in hand with this, is his inability to fully accept that he’s actually in a relationship with a terrific woman who he describes as his ‘sort-of girlfriend’ but who the reader very quickly realises Kick’s in love with.

So far, so typical. But Rooney manages to make Patrick more than a caricature of modern manhood. He cares. About his sister, his nephew, his mother, and about humanity itself. He’s secretly taking clown classes with the intention of being a hospital clown. He aptly rejects bro-lit as ‘cherry-picked historical anecdotes for sociopaths’; the manosphere as ‘one black-and-white rule: Act at all times like an asshole from a posture of deception and bad faith’; and much of modernity as ‘the morons insisting we pay our brains as tribute to piggish AI overlords who might let us stick around to fix the robots if we’re lucky’.

And, ultimately, with more than a little help from the sentient (maybe) sea creatures he encounters along the way, he realises just how much he cares and just how much he has to care about.

This sounds trite. Well, yes, in the same way that someone who’s never watched It’s a Wonderful Life might read a synopsis and think it was trite. Indeed, one of the things you realise reading Rooney’s writing is that you’re in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Which is why I would thoroughly recommend spending some time adrift with her and Kick.