“Surfing is ill-served being described as a sport. He grew up on the island (the son of a producer of the TV show Hawaii Five-O), and then went on an odyssey through Sumatra, Australia, Madagascar and Fiji, where he and a friend discovered a now legendary wave. Barbarian Days is a tome – 447 pages – dedicated to his ardor for it, an ardor which propelled him through the bays and coves of California and Hawaii. Sipping a margarita as tourists trek the boardwalk outside, he discusses the compulsions and paradoxes of surfing, Hollywood’s failure to make a decent surfing film, the trapdoors of memoir – and why he hopes his 13-year-old daughter will not surf. I don’t want her to be swallowed up William Finnegan I don’t recommend surfing to my daughter. Still, Finnegan is handsome, tall, fit, has a full head of silver hair and sports a crisp white shirt. The skin is mottled and adorned with fine scars. In person there’s no missing the legacy of a lifetime being bashed by waves, blasted by sun and perforated by rock and coral. I thought people might recoil and say, ‘oh you’re just a dumb surfer, I don’t need to pay attention to you’.” The New Yorker’s then editor-in-chief, he recalled, had “general disdain for athletes and outdoor people”.

“Writing about surfing seemed indulgent and silly. It’s quite a turnaround from the 1980s when Finnegan hesitated to reveal his secret to east coast magazine editors who paid him to write about politics, apartheid and war.

Who knew that the dudes out on the waves were existential explorers? as a role model for a life fully, thrillingly, lived,” trilled the Wall Street Journal.įinnegan has made surfing worthy of philosophical probing. “ Dare I say that we all need Mr Finnegan. “ If the book has a flaw, it lies in the envy helplessly induced in the armchair surf-traveler,” pined the New York Times, echoing a wistful refrain among reviewers. “ An utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing,” glowed the New York Review of Books. It has debuted at No 5 on the New York Times bestseller list, trailing ecstatic reviews. Finnegan was in Los Angeles on a west coast tour this week to promote the book, which is published by Penguin Press. William Finnegan thinks all good surfers start before they’re 14: ‘After that it’s too late to be any good’ Photograph: Courtesy of William Finnegan

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