IT'S ONLY DROWNING

A middle-aged man learns to surf—and tolerate Joe Rogan devotees, too.

“Surfing is for lunatics,” declares former Obama speechwriter Litt. As a case in point, he recounts the surf-happy ways of his brother-in-law, who thinks nothing of cruising the waves off New Jersey on Christmas Day, behavior that Litt finds inexplicable. But then comes Trump’s first election and Covid-19, “a towering lasagna of calamity.” Seeking something new to do to cope with the pandemic, Litt wanders into a surf shop, buys a wetsuit, and arranges for lessons. “I imagined learning to surf would be a fun but manageable challenge, like learning a language,” he writes. “It was only later…that I revised my view. Learning to surf is like learning a language that wants to kill you.” Anxieties and early disasters notwithstanding, Litt sticks to it, and in time he becomes a competent if not Olympic-level surfer, and one with a big goal: to surf the huge waves off Hawaii’s North Shore. A few test runs send the message that maybe that’s not such a good idea, but he pairs up with that brother-in-law, very much Litt’s opposite in temperament and especially in politics (“My brother-in-law wasn’t a Trump supporter. But he also wasn’t not”), and rides it out, carrying a bit of advice from an old-timer in the front of his mind: “You’ve just got to go out and get your ass kicked.” So he does. A neat trick in Litt’s amiable memoir is that his language becomes more and more surfer-dudish page by page (“when waves approach from the perfect angle…they compound themselves into supersized rights that peel for hundreds of yards”). It’s all good fun, and if it lacks the bravado of Daniel Duane’s mad-dog surf writing, it’s both honest and entertaining.

A pleasing paean to the art of learning something new—and something “pretty great.”