Your teacher’s name
This section of the novel mixes Miles’s private life with his increasingly famous public profile. At the start of Chapter Seven he overhears his parents discussing divorce and this hangs over this whole section. The readers are also introduced to a neighbour, Florence, who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s and whom Miles checks on frequently. Florence allegedly has psychic powers and we are told that she has made various predictions about events and occurrences within the the town of Olympia. His conversations with Phelps, who helps him collect calms and other marine life, are often about sex – either the sex lives of marine creatures or of humans: in Chapter Eleven, Phelps shows Miles a pornographic magazine which he has stolen from his older brother’s collection and in Chapter Twelve Miles has a long conversation in his room with Angie Stenger, who once baby-sat him, but on whom he has an enormous crush – despite her age and her experience. Chapter Twelve actually ends with Miles masturbating with images of Angie in his mind.
In the public sphere, Miles makes another unusual discovery in Chapter Nine: another dead fish, but one which lurks at the bottom of the ocean and yet has beached up on the bay where Miles lives. There are welts on the fish which correspond in size to the suckers on the giant squid’s tentacles and Miles imagines that the two creatures must fought their way around the ocean and ended up in the bay, oblivious to their surroundings. This new discovery brings Miles more attention from marine academics who are trying to make sense of what this fish is doing in this place, and also from the media – a television interviewer and her cameraman film and interview Miles and Phelps as they work on the beach in Chapter Eleven.
I thought the most interesting section was in Chapter Eleven where Miles has a dream in which images from the pornographic magazine merge in his mind with Angie (who strikes the reader as unavailable – she is clearly sexually experienced and hints that she takes recreational drugs). Miles may be infatuated with Angie, but Angie, despite her affection for him, is too old for him and has been accepted by the University of North Carolina’s music program.
