Reviewed by Gail Louise Siegel
Man Overboard
by Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books, Simon & Schuster
July 2026, Hardcover, 198 pp. ISBN 978-1-6682-1238-7
Perhaps it’s my cynicism, but one recent fiction often feels indistinguishable from the next. Friends recount books with similar plots. Dialogue sounds overly familiar—phrases ripped from the latest tweets or posts or untruths. Geography feels irrelevant. I’ve read books set in a Chicago that could be a clone of Kansas City or Savannah or Des Moines. Voice, likewise, lacks originality, as flattened as the non-accents of news readers.
Even the recipe for titles involves the same words plus an adjective or two for seasoning, all tossed in a phrase generator. Of course, publishers are only trying to make a buck, and as every street vendor with a stack of purses knows, there is profit in knock-offs. Our entertainment milieu relies on sequels and imitation. For every Addams Family there will always be a Munster.
So it’s an extra treat to read a novel fresh in plot, attitude and language. Kathleen Rooney’s Man Overboard give us reluctant cruise passenger Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick, flailing in the sea when he should be resting on his laurels for winning an air guitar contest in the ship’s bar.
We follow Kick as he treads water over the next twenty hours, hoping for rescue. And while he sculls and kicks and tries to recall if he fell or jumped into the Gulf of Mexico, we are immersed in his inner and outer worlds.
With its sargassum and sea horses and cannonball jellyfish, we won’t confuse Kick’s Gulf with some other body of water. And as a trainer and gym rat with an interest in clown school, Kick’s musings can’t be confused with any other seafaring protagonist’s.
And perhaps most delightful, with her humor and clever word play, we could never mistake Kathleen Rooney for any other writer. Man Overboard sparkles. As Rooney’s Kick makes observations about his dilemma, we are treated to a glistening stream of consciousness as he riffs, with bitterness or resolve, on his stamina, his estranged mother, annoying brother-in-law, patient girlfriend and more:
Chop, swell, surge, surf—the ocean circulates itself like our blood. Except the ocean currents never cease and my blood 100 percent could. Carrying nutrients and marine life, the waters around me spiral clockwise…It feels now, late afternoon, like the currents are circling harder, but it could be me, increasingly sluggish. Circling clockwise around the ultimate drain? (150)
Kick’s unfathomable predicament leads him to quip about the water’s depth in fathoms, beginning on page 161:
This constant swirl and sway of waves that people insist on giving the name ‘the sea’ – seventeen hours in, I still can’t fathom even the Gulf’s immensity.
A fathom’s a unit of measure equal to six feet, meant to correspond to the length of a man’s outstretched arms. When I was a kid, I pronounced it wrong.
‘I can’t phantom how Miss Lovig expects us to automatically be good at cursive!’ I complained, coming home with a B-minus on my handwriting homework, flinging my backpack dramatically onto the davenport…
I cannot fathom that I might die out here among the countless fathoms. Cannot phantom that I might become a phantom.’
Here Kick goes from fathom as understanding, to fathom as measurement, to a childhood memory of confusing fathom and phantom, to the fathomlessness of dying and thus becoming a phantom. It’s almost as if his thoughts mimic the swirls and sways of the quote’s opening sentence.
Rooney’s deft free associations are more than a linguistic entertainment. Sometimes they mirror the physical swell and twist of the water. Often they are akin to a whirlpool, pulling Kick into his deepest past, as when his mother survives cancer, only to abandon her family when Kick is merely eleven years old.
Some of his meanderings treat us to trivia about clowns, or the distance swimmer Diana Nyad. Others are darkly funny. Memories of a kid whacking a finger in shop class so it looked like a corpse have Kick note he must:
look pretty corpse-like in the briny deep—me a single object in the brine, like a forgotten pickle in the jars Granny Sue likes to make with cucumbers from her garden, an eerie bright green like a video of the Chicago River on Saint Patrick’s Day… (132)
All this from our hero, who is in quite a pickle himself.
Throughout, Kick’s past surges into the terrifying present on the tides of Rooney’s evocative wordplay. And Rooney is playful in other ways as well. We meet a variety of wise-cracking sea creatures. A few are named, improbably, after snack foods like Frito and Pringles. It’s no wonder that Kick speculates upon talking animal jokes.
There is irony, too. For while I’ve yet to mention it, now in his thirties, Kick was a champion high school swimmer.
Knowing that, we read with hope that he will survive—the book’s central question. As hours pass and death hovers, we cling (like a peach, Kick would say) to that hope. For as one hour turns to four, then twelve, then twenty, we become so intimate with Kick’s inner life that we are as invested in him finishing his unfinished business as he is. So we keep floating along, from cursive homework, to pickles, to clown school, to the Chicago River—ever eager for him to reach shore.
About the reviewer: Gail Louise Siegel’s fiction has appeared in dozens of literary journals, from Agni and Ascent to Wigleaf and Zoetrope All-Story Extra. Her book reviews have been in publications such as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Tupelo Quarterly. Her prose includes short stories such as “Commuting” and a reprint of “Don’t Burn My Body While I’m Gone” in FRiGG. She has worked in formats such as the triptych “Excavation” in Matter Press, and in short shorts including “Pork Chops” in 3AM Magazine. Her creative nonfiction includes “The Storytelling Argument” in The Tupelo Press and “Mouth” in New World Writing. Somehow, her ancient blog WISH IT WERE FICTION—now an early career archive—has outlived many of its contemporary journals. A forthcoming short essay will appear in MicroLit. She has an MFA from Bennington College and lives in Evanston, Illinois.