THINGS THAT ARE FUNNY ON A SUBMARINE BUT NOT REALLY

A raunchy, darkly funny, unusual coming-of-age novel set largely underneath the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

David, nicknamed “Dead Man,” is a U.S. submarine radio operator nearing the end of his hitch. On the one hand, he feels keenly the tedium, the fear, and the cramped dark rigidity of life in the Navy; there’s the tug to go home and get on with the life others have envisioned for you. Against that, though, there’s the secret, profane, addictive, uproarious rapport that develops in the deep sea, in Dead Man’s beloved “steel tube of dumb,” created by the combination of claustrophobia and camaraderie. Murphy playfully and persuasively recreates the scabrous, hilarious, often juvenile sociolect of these young submariners, the language of young men barking and fronting. Dead Man tries hard to think of his experiences as a kind of idyll, but it’s an idyll on a razor’s edge: The casual violence (sometimes almost joyous) and little upwellings of insanity (colorful, the stuff of anecdote) can’t be contained. His closest friend on the ship, Grenadier, tries to commit suicide. The malign ship’s doctor pressures Dead Man to surveil his other close friend, Tintin, who’s suspected of being a Chinese spy. Then Grenadier drowns, and Dead Man—being punished by Doc both for noncooperation and because he knows that the doctor was drugging Grenadier to keep him docile—finds himself exiled from the sub and on base duty in Guam as Covid descends. The book’s second half depicts Dead Man’s turbulent, reluctant return to David: the trip home, mustering out, and the transition to a midwestern campus where he feels utterly out of place. He’s haunted at first by the needling ghost of Grenadier, who seems mostly to want to goad him to give college a try. Once David (or “Death Man,” as a new friend garbles the nickname) arrives and after a few months starts, tentatively and precariously, to find friends, Tintin—an agent of id and rage and chaos—arrives to sow destruction, and to make it clear to David that these two worlds aren’t compatible. He will have to choose.

The rollicking, sometimes frightening, in-the-end surprisingly moving evolution of a submariner into a mensch.