Challenger Deep

I have mixed feelings on this book, and I'm not really sure specifically what it is that didn't work for me. There's no single glaring thing, but there are a collection of problems:

Firstly: the pacing and chapter format is horrible. Because each chapter was short, we are in the hundreds by the time the book ends, and nothing reminds me how slow the read is better than looking up and seeing I'm on chapter 123 and we're still not done.

Secondly: the pieces of this book could have worked better if they were in a better order with other parts cut out entirely. Caden's life before he went to the hospital would have been fine to consider and have some scenes if his life and the characters in it were all that interesting, but they're not. Those characters arrive when he actually gets to the hospital, and they don't get nearly the screen time they deserve. Start this book with him being in the hospital and give us the mixture of flashbacks to how he got there, the encounters on the ship, and actual time in treatment to keep the pace going and keep it feeling dynamic.

If this book was going to be about mental illness and how the entire family copes with it, then that's one thing. Structure it similarly to My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult where we get every perspective on what's going on. But this story is about Caden and his struggles with mental illness.


Because the best characters don't get enough screentime, it makes their deaths and departures miss the story beats where we're supposed to feel devastated. Hal is easily my favorite character in the book, and because he doesn't get as much focus as he should, I'm less affected by his death, or at least his attempt.

I do like/hate that we get no closure with them. I want to know if Callie ever makes contact. I want to know if Hal survived. But the end theme of this book is coping with the uncertainty and the never's in your life. We meet so many people we'll never see again, no matter how significant our relationships with them.

In terms of the central theme of mental illness, does the book deliver on this attempt to explore? For the most part, yes, but the way the author chose to go about it didn't hit the right beats for me. The ship analogy and his stuff with the crew rarely felt evocative or interesting. I found myself really tuning out those chapters. I don't think the analogy is bad, it's just not the one I would have used, and it definitely didn't resonate with me.

The writing style hampers the overall attempt at exploring mental illness as well. Something about the word choice, the fear of experimental, stream of consciousness writing really makes the exploration feel clinical rather than evocative. The glimpse of what this could have looked like comes from the moments where Caden's time on the ship and his time in the hospital overlap in the same paragraphs and sentences. That part I really liked.

This book lacks catharsis, and in no scene is that better illustrated than when he actually reaches the bottom of the Challenger Deep to find all his treasures are chocolates, taking him back to his interaction with the homeless man. The Deep is supposed to, in my mind, hold some deep dark trauma, something buried. But there's nothing of consequence. Just a random interaction with this homeless man. So his ascent from there feels undeserved. What is he overcoming? More importantly, what is he doing?

Maybe this is because Caden is a passive and one dimensional character. Things just happen to him and he lacks any sense of agency or initiative. If the point is to show that not everything has a deep cause or a meaning, then give him this question to wrestle with. Make him obsessed with trying to make meaning of his life. Make him obsessed with trying to find out what's in the Challenger Deep. If he is actually interested at all, I certainly didn't notice and I doubt Caden does either.

Challenger Deep is a tricky book. I want to root for it and everything it's trying to do, but the lack of character agency, missing emotional beats, and choice of writing techniques make it really hard to emotionally engage with the material. Is it worth the read?

Nah.