87 pages • 2 hours read
Chris CrutcherWhale Talk
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
T.J. secures three-hour workout slots at All Night Fitness and finishes assembling the Mermen with his recruitment of Simon DeLong, an overweight teen who gets custom Speedos as a result; Jackie Craig, a nondescript teen who was cut from the JV football team; and Andy Mott, known for his limping gait, surliness, strength, and height.
T.J. credits Carly Hudson, his girlfriend, with giving him the calm he needs to manage the team. T.J. met Carly after a series of unsuccessful relationships, just as predicted by Georgia Brown, the therapist whohelped T.J. work on his anger issues after his adoption. T.J.’s previous relationships always ended because he smothered his girlfriends with attention in an attempt to make himself “indispensable” (68), an unhealthy dynamic because girls who liked such treatment would always be unhealthy, while those who did not like it would end the relationship.
Carly is different; she is “a jock” whose “natural sexuality” (69) instantly attracted T.J. He met her during the summer between his sophomore and junior year one night at the river after she struck up a conversation with him. Because he was playing it cool, he didn’t ask her to an upcoming dance but was upset when she showed up with his nemesis, Mike Barbour. During the dance, T.J. told her how bad a person Mike was.
She responded by pointing out that she was dating him just to be sure she was right in thinking that he was like her father, a successful builder from Idaho but also a violent, cruel man who beat her mother and prevented her from playing basketball because he thought it wasn’t a feminine enough sport. Even worse is that he onceviolently dragged her from a standard cheerleading routine in a game, because he thought the cheer was too sexually provocative. He threatened to beat her if she ever did so again.Back at home, Carly destroyed the paint job and windows on his Lexus and told him that she would do it again and give him bad local publicity in the press if he hurt her or her mother again. She quit cheering the next day and took up basketball.
Although Carly hates her father’s actions, she has even more distaste for her mother’s refusal to leave her father. As a child, Carly became a master at packing up enough clothing and personal items for three days, the longest her mother managed to stay away from her father every time she left with her kids. She told T.J. that since Thomas, her brother, is sixteen, and she has given up on her mother, she intends to leave.
She concluded her conversation at the dance by establishing the terms under which she would have a relationship with T.J. She expected them to either be friends or in a monogamous sexual relationship but not both.They had to use double birth control. She would always run her own life and refuse to put up with whining if she had to prioritize her own activities over the relationship.T.J. agreed to all of this, a decision that ended his cycle of failed relationships.
The contrast between the violence of the Hudsons’ relationship and the respect in the Jones’ relationship is apparent to T.J. He recognizes that his difficulties are relatively easy ones. His life is a one that allows him to “lock onto whatever [he] is passionate about” (77), as opposed to the lives of Carly or Chris, whose good days are the ones when they escape violence or bullying.T.J. closes the chapter by remarking that John Paul’s good days are ones on which he manages to forget July 27, 1968. “Everything,” he states, “is relative” (77).
Chapter 5 Summary
The Jones family has “a legacy of helping kids,” according to T.J. (78). His mother’s desire to help kids is a result of her work as a court attorney for juveniles. His father’s motivation is different, however.As a young person, his father did not do well in school. He skipped college and started working in a Harley motorcycle shop, then became a truck driver in orderto see the country. Unfortunately for him, he was stuck on a route between Boise, Idaho, and the small town of New Meadows, where the goods in his truck and the information he brought made him a welcome face.
A year into his driving stint, he met a widow in New Meadows. She had an eighteen-month-old boy and had lost her husband two years ago in a hunting accident. After lunch one day, the widow and John Paul had a sexual encounter at her house. Unbeknownst to John Paul, when he pulled away from her house that day, her little boy had crawled into the wheel well of his truck. The little boy was mangled and killed as a result, which John Paul found out only after he arrived home six hours later.
John Paul told T.J. this story when T.J. was twelve. After John Paul found out what he had done, he wanted to kill himself. He wanted to be punished, but neither the widow nor the law would hold him responsible. He started working in a sawmill and sending all his earnings, minus what he needed to live, to the widow. She began returning the money after a few months, however. He would torture himself with the irony of the good feelings he had on his drive back home after being with the widow because he didn’t know he had killed his son.
Thirty years later, T.J. is still able to see the mark of this event in his father’s life. The death of the boy transformed John Paul “into a saint, as far as his public behavior goes”(84). Although John Paul doesn’t attend church, T.J. recognizes in him a deep-seated commitment “to do ‘right’” (84). T.J. even suspects that John Paul’s consistent attention to him is another effort to achieve redemption.
T.J. then shifts gears to talk about his progress with the team. Every recruit except for Andy Mott has shown up for practice. The pool at All Night Fitness is not big enough to accommodate all the swimmers at one time,or for the training exercises they need to do. T.J. solves the problemby creating swim workout spaces on the benches near the pool. Although T.J.’s teammates want him to spend the most time in the water because he is the most competitive swimmer, he takes his turn on the benches for the sake of camaraderie. Kept awake by the loud music the team listens to while they train, Oliver becomes an unofficial coach while the team waits for Simet to be recognized as their official coach.
T.J. meets with Simet to update him on the team’s progress and to discuss letter requirements. Since most of the swimmers are not competitive enough to get letters based on wins at meets, T.J. suggests to Simet that they earn letters simply for not drowning. Simet cautions T.J. that the athletics department places a lot of importance on the letters, so he asks T.J. to think about a compromise that is less likely to ruffle its feathers.
T.J. notices that Rich Marshall is more and more present in his life. Rich is “a kind of a cross between a kid and an adult” (90)—he helps the football coaching staff and with P.E. classes, but he also hangs out with his high school friends and glares at T.J. in the halls.Rich is even a presence in T.J.’s relationship with Georgia Brown, his therapist. One day when he goes to visit her, he walks in on a play therapy session between Georgia and a little girl named Heidi, who is multiracial.
As she has done in the past, Georgia enlists T.J. to play the role of “bad dad they [traumatized children] want to tie up and put in prison”(91). During the therapy session, Heidi plays with her dolls, then instructs T.J. to locate “‘all the nigger dolls’” and to scream “‘Stupid black bitch’” at the dark-skinned dolls (92). Heidi also tells him to yell at her for having black babies in the house and to feel free to physically abuse the dark dolls as he throws them out of the house (93). As T.J. locates the last black doll and throws it out of the room, he catches a glimpse of someone exiting Georgia’s house.
After the play with the dolls, T.J. talks with Georgia as Heidi attempts to wash her skin color off in the hope that her father will love her more without it. T.J. works alongside her, and eventually tells her that he doesn’t think it can be washed off and that they could hurt themselves if they keep it up. He bounces a happy Heidi on his shoulders while he dances to Bob Marley’s reggae music, thinking about how she will “come crashing down the moment she is degraded again” and the despair she will feel (96).
Georgia forces T.J. to sign a confidentially agreement that prevents him from disclosing anything that happened in the session. Georgia reveals to him that Heidi is Alicia Marshall’s daughter. T.J. then remembers thatHeidi is the stepdaughter of Rich and Alicia, a young white woman who conceived Heidi with Willis Stack—atalented African-American football player whose career was cut short after he was paralyzed—during a break-up with Rich.
After Willis abandoned Alicia, she dropped out of beautician school to have her baby and began working at a food-packing plant, where she ran into Rich again. Rich managed to convince her that no one would want her because of her daughter’s African-American heritage. Alicia married him and had two children with him.
Rich’s abuse of Heidi and Alicia’s failure to protect her eventually led to the children being placed outside of the home by Child Protective Services.Both parents are currently completing mandated mental-health treatments, including anger management and parenting classes. Alicia got provisional custody of the children back again with the requirement that she keep Rich away from the children and continue her treatment.
The session with Heidi makes T.J. detest Rich even more and feel protective of Heidi, who has internalized negative ideas about her race. He reflects on what Georgia told him about racism: “absent the element of hate, a person’s skin color is only an indication of his or her geographical ancestry. But with that element, it is a soul stealer”(102).
Chapter 6 Summary
As the team continues training, T.J. gets a better sense of members’ strengths and weaknesses as they practice and weight-train. T.J. knows, however, that the biggest indicator for success for a swimmer is “the number of yards he or she can log in the water”(105). T.J. knows they need “creative individual goals” to stay motivated, but he is confident that he can work out a way for everyone to get a letter (106).
Other aspects of T.J.’s life are more troublesome. T.J. figures out that Alicia must have told Rich about his work with Heidi since Rich is regularly giving him unpleasant looks. T.J. is accustomed to getting racially-tinged comments from both Rich and Mike, so he is not sure if he should be worried or not. The general atmosphere in Cutter is one that lends itself to these kinds of racial tensions. The Aryan Nation and Neo-Nazis are regular presences in the region.
T.J. recalls watching a Neo-Nazi parade in Spokane for a journalism assignment and coming away with the impression that they were “ridiculous” (107). Nevertheless, he is also aware of Neo-Nazi violence in the region and the nation because John Paul called it to his attention and asked him to be aware of it. T.J. feels cautious about Rich because he suspects that he saw Rich socializing at the Neo-Nazi parade. He grows even more uneasy after Rich directly confronts him. Rich tells him that he will do anything to get his family back and makes a shooting gesture at T.J.
T.J. trains hard that night to alleviate the “fear and contempt” he feels after the encounter (109). After practice, Oliver (now going by the name “Icko,” short for “Interim Coach Oliver”), tells T.J. the team doesn’t really look like a swim team aside from T.J. He also asks if there is some conflict surrounding the team because he came across Barbour bullying Chris behind the hardware store about his brother’s letter jacket (Chris was not wearing the jacket at the time). Oliver defused the situation by talking to Mike while holding a piece of rebar in his hand.
This development solidifies T.J.’s commitment to making sure everyone on the team gets a letter. Simet talks with T.J. later about the same topic. He tells T.J. that Coach Benson acknowledged that each coach gets to set letter requirements but that he hoped Simet would not water down the requirements or allow T.J. to “make a sham” of the letter jackets (113). T.J. responds by saying he thinks the athletic system is a sham anyway and that he just wants to make that obvious. Simet cautions him, however, and asks if there is some conflict between T.J. and Mike. Simet ends the conversation with a reminder that Simet will have to work at the school even after T.J. is gone and requests that T.J. not take his war with the athletes too far. Because he knows Simet understands teens, T.J. presumes he has a lot of room to maneuver before he goes too far.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters include events that predominantly take place off the school campus and that illustrate some of the creative ways that people respond to violence, tragedy, abuse, and inequality.
One of the significant forms of violence represented in these chapters is gendered violence, specifically the abuse Carly and her family suffer at the hands of her father and the violence Alicia and her family experience from Rich. Carly’s abuse happens within an affluent, intact family, which shows that violence can occur within families regardless of class or configuration. Carly’s response to this violence is to confront her father directly with the threat of exposure that will do damage to his business interests, a tactic that only works because of her family’s social and economic status. Beyond her family’s status, Carly is able to leverage her talent as an athlete and her relationships outside of home as bases for surviving this abuse.
Alicia is not quite so fortunate. While her economic class is never explicitly addressed, the fact that she attends beautician school rather than college after high school and that she is forced to work in the frozen foods factory to support herself indicate that she does not have the same resources or leverage that Carly has. Her options are more limited. The intervention of Child Protective Services and the goodwill of the Jones family are her only saving graces. Crutcher’s representation of her path out of abuse and violence underscores the point that lack of economic resources and random factors such as talent can make or break a person’s efforts to escape the cycle of violence.
The impact of violence and tragedy on a person’s life can be mitigated by his or her responses to challenging circumstances. This point is most illustrated by John Paul’s responses to the inadvertent violence he visited on the little boy he accidentally killed thirty years before. While John Paul is ultimately not morally or legally culpable for the boy’s death, his actions in the years that follow—attempting to offer financial restitution to the widow and his deep commitment to caring for the children in his life, including T.J.—show that intentionality and focusing on helping others can certainly serve as balms to people who are wounded by tragic events. Georgia’s practice, rooted in child’s play, is another creative means of working through tragedy and violence.
The person who most responds to negative events and forces in creative ways is T.J. His commitment to building the Mermen is a case in point. While T.J. does engage in conflict with perpetrators of violence and inequality, his primary responses are ones that allow him to engage with his antagonists symbolically. He wears a bloody shirt to school, tells the story of the killing of the fawn repeatedly, calls in to the radio show to protest the hiring of Mark Furman, andreports on white nationalist activity in the northwestern United States and in his community. Protest and offering of testimony are time-honored tactics of nonviolence. The creation of the Mermen is at its roots an effort to respond to preferential treatment for the athletes through sport and through the subversion of the athletic letter system by showing that it is a “sham” (113). T.J.’s participation in Heidi’s therapy alsoallows him to assume an active role in a creative, healing practice.
Although he is the protagonist of the novel, T.J. serves as an important bystander and witness to the struggles of many other characters to survive overwhelming challenges in their lives. Crutcher uses his responses to the experiences of the other characters as a means of characterization and to develop important themes in the novel.
Related Titles
By Chris Crutcher
