SUBMERSED

Close encounters with DIY submarine culture’s underbelly.

A sharp researcher and stylish writer who’s “obsessed with obsessives,” Frank sets aside his lifelong fear of the ocean in this excellent book to plumb the peculiar depths of the DIY sub community. The water is cold. Beneath the niche fixations of geeky tinkerers and misfit enthusiasts, Frank discovers a strong undercurrent of violence and misogyny. The manosphere, it seems, has entered the bathysphere. “For some men,” he writes, “the presence of a woman on the submarine not only conjures their inadequacies, but also reminds them that the sub itself...isn’t so different from land: rife with whimsy, chance, perplexity.” One such man would appear to be Peter Madsen. Convicted of the brutal 2017 killing in Denmark of Swedish freelance journalist Kim Wall, Madsen was a narcissistic amateur rocket builder who became obsessed with submarines as a “safe haven from surface mores,” where he alone could exert “ultimate control.” The story of the murder and its aftermath—including a prison sit-down between Frank and Madsen—provides a chilling throughline to an otherwise interdisciplinary look at what lies beneath the human compulsion to dive. Frank is witty and incisive—a sub-builder meetup, for example, is like being “trapped in a bouillon cube of white male machismo”—and he draws wonderful connections throughout. Along with contemporary academics, we encounter Aristotle, who was obsessed with the “watery world,” and his student Alexander the Great, whose diving bell served as both tactical advantage and personal retreat. Mythic creatures of Nordic and Norse folktales arrive, as does Jules Verne, who we learn would find it absurd to dream of going 20,000 leagues deep (it was a measure of distance). We also spend time with a few amateur sub builders. The most memorable is Shanee Stopnitzki, “one of the few ‘non-dudes’” in the community. She gives the book some of its best lines, including this one: “I think curiosity makes everything better.” In this book, Frank’s certainly has.

A fascinating voyage among the hidden tides shaping a social niche.