Had Chris Tharp titled his fictional travelogue / prison memoir / food diary something along the lines of, say, Locked Up in Asia: A Journey to Hell and Back, or, conversely, The ESL Movement: A Continuance of Colonialism? it could very well have scraped the lower rungs of a 2025 bestseller list. From Midnight Express to Locked Up Abroad, everyone and their mother seems to love hearing about obnoxious Americans or Brits getting locked up for decades off the back of their bad behavior in foreign lands. Similarly, the internet seems automatically suspicious of ESL teachers in Asia, tagging them as fringe characters who couldn’t succeed in their homelands with either careers or women and, more often than not, as no-jury-needed sex tourists. But the fact that Tharp resisted the agent and publisher who were no doubt in his ear about this, instead naming it after the East Asian island penitentiary so lavishly detailed in his tale it ends up functioning as a main character, is just the first in a long list of things to admire about this waywardly entertaining novel.
For a book trading in such weighty matters as imprisonment, drug laws, dead parents, global warming, sex tourism, cultural appropriation, and the ever-present, warm, stale breath of colonialism, The Cuttlefish is, against the greatest odds, an entirely fun book. Tharp is simply too sharp a scribbler to become bogged down by these, deftly dodging their traps in favor of what become the core tenets of this tale: food porn, cartoonish violence, meticulously detailed local color, baseball lore, and gallons of cheap, cold Beer Lai Lai. And while Tharp’s incorrigible narrator, Zach, doesn’t entirely ignore this preset backdrop of big-ticket serious discourse points, he tends to acknowledge them in passing, since in the moment these matters mean much less to him than his next steaming-hot box of fried dumplings.
Zach, you see, is a simple enough man. First and foremost, Zach enjoys food. More specifically he loves Shanki — “deep-fried dumplings stuffed with garlic, ginger, shrimp and pure pork fat” — to which he is hopelessly addicted and which are so lovingly detailed they function more effectively as a romantic foil than either of the two women he lusts after over the course of the book. Another thing Zach loves is beer, more specifically Beer Lai Lai, ice cold and by the gallon, which he uses to wash down the Shanki. Branching out as the third prong of Zach’s obsession is baseball, a sport he played back in America before ditching the pastime in favor of dumplings and beer, and which resurges on his fictional island of Sukhan due to the nation’s obsession with their beloved local Paigan Cloud Bank Bugbears team. Seemingly everything else in Zach’s life — tangible matters of money, romantic interests and his writing career, and metaphysical concerns like spirituality and one’s place on the planet — fall by the wayside. Our Zach’s core immediate concerns are always the Shanki, the Beer Lai Lai, the next Bugbear game. He never seems to trick himself into believing there is more out there for him, and this fact firmly bestows on him that rarest of all literary attributes: a truly honest character.
This isn’t to say that Zach brings nothing special to the island nation of Sukhan. As evidenced in the few scenes where he flexes his ESL skills, he proves a pretty good teacher with an instinct for the learning habits of both adults and children. The children in particular are wonderful in this novel, with Tharp capturing the average child’s capacity for abject cruelty, an aspect often ignored or misinterpreted in literature and film.
“This is you,” an adorable little girl says to Zach, displaying an unflattering sketch of her teacher. “Very fat. Pig . . . . Many hairs. So dirty . . . . You wear girl panty . . . . I put bomb under you . . . . BOOM!”
Insulting and concerningly violent? Sure. But are the little girl’s English skills improving? Why yes, they are. And all at the hands of “Teacher Jack Black” — Zach, whose unkept beard and expanding frame have earned him the moniker of the island’s favorite comedian.
On the grown-up level, Zach’s teaching skills become even more evident while tutoring the adult daughter of the Cuttlefish’s prison warden, a love interest that is never allowed to flourish due to Zach’s prisoner status and his student’s apparent disinterest. Many readers may find themselves rooting for this romance, since Zach seems to form a natural bond and genuine affection for this woman that goes beyond the primal lust of a long-term inmate. That Tharp manages to sidestep this too-tidy plot setup is testament to The Cuttlefish’s endearingly messy vibe and refusal to fit into the dozens of cliché traps that could ensnare it at any moment.
Westerners creating Asia-centered art has always been a tricky prospect. Take, for example, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, a film that in its day was hailed as a profound, almost-masterpiece and is now more often than not seen as a particularly ignorant example of exploitative navel-gazing, in which two multimillionaires work out their midlife and quarter-life crises against a Tokyo backdrop that is mere window dressing for their ennui. And while Tharp’s Asia-bound prose could very well fall into this camp — and indeed seems to mirror the Bill Murray character’s bemused gaze upon the landscape at times — Zach is far too self-deprecating to ever fall into the exploitation void. Tharp is a journalist, and therefore instills in this character a sweeping, cinematic understanding of the fictional nation of Sukhan, from its ancient history to its modern economics and political landscape. This places Zach several notches above his fellow expats — an Aussie drug smuggler, a number of fellow teachers, travel and food bloggers, and several others of indeterminate careers or purposes for being on the island — even though Zach’s wayward demeanor and capacity for horrendous errors in judgement also cast him as something of a rogue among this gaggle of stateless reprobates.
A fine example of Tharp’s sharp eye for the more outlandish aspects of “Sukhanese” culture is a character who I wish had her own spin-off novel: Blueberry. This gangsta slang-patois-jiving, blunt-smoking, sideways-baseball-cap-rocking firebrand, who is dating the aforementioned Aussie smuggler despite a preference for Black men she developed on a yearlong visit to Bed-Stuy, is the rare type of side character who manages to flavor an entire novel despite only appearing in several scenes. Blueberry is also a fine example of Zach’s eye for cultural absurdities — a gaze that, unlike Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, rings more adoring than cynical.
More than anything else, The Cuttlefish is a vibe novel. The city of Paigan may not exist, but you can feel it, taste it, see it clearly in the descriptive passages laced throughout the novel. You can feel the furnace-like summer heat, delirious and tropical, clamping down on the populace with the morning sun. You can feel the sweat on your skin, the grit on the back of your neck as you fight anarchic traffic on a cheap motorbike. You can taste the cold, refreshing shock of a watery Beer Lai Lai as the evening comes on. And, most importantly, you can taste the dumplings. The multiple passages focused on Zack’s beloved Shanki ring more lustfully romantic than the ones focused on Donna, his casual love interest. By the novel’s close, we still don’t really know what this Donna looks like. But we know everything about Shanki: the fried, hard outer shell, the initial rush of sharp shrimp flavor, followed by the ginger burst, capped with that lazy, slow ooze of pork fat. Shanki are everything to Zach. Shanki are a celebration on his brightest days, a bastion of calm in the midst of a chaotic foreign metropolis, a comfort in his darkest, most terrified moments: “He set the phone down, picked the chopsticks back up, snatched the plumpest-looking Shanki, and placed it into his mouth. As he bit down . . . and felt the flavor explode, he knew then that everything was right in the world.”
And yet, unlike, say, Anthony Bourdain, Zach never once comes across as lecturing or platitude prone. He isn’t urging you to break free of imagined constraints, to sit on a crate with a box of noodles as a photo-op antidote to ill-defined Western shackles. He isn’t trying to tie his beloved Shanki to any specific cultural context. Zach simply loves dumplings and cheap beer in a visceral way that transcends any food-and-travel-blog posturing. As a matter of fact, his fellow expat foodies with blogs get a good amount of invective flung at them — in particular the insufferable Greg, who pens “insipid, watered-down pablum aimed at the lowest common denominator.”
Whereas The Cuttlefish’s first half is a jaunty free fall into the good and bad of an expat culture that seems to stay just a half-step ahead of the wide-reaching doomscroll enveloping places like Zach’s native Seattle, the second half is something else entirely. Zach’s mistakes in the first half — accidentally exposing himself to a roomful of adult women ESL students, going on a Shanki / Beer Lai Lai / Adderall binge on a work night — are endearing and slapstick, but the mistakes of Cuttlefish’s second half are downright tragic. Everyone with a Netflix subscription knows not to smuggle drugs, weed or otherwise, between Asian nations, that the very last thing you would ever want is to be tossed into a foreign prison. And yet Zach dives right into such matters as if he were simply walking down the block for a warm box of Shanki. This is the part of the novel where naysayers might point out a non-believable texture to the story arc, but the world-building narration never falters, sending the tale into a realm of magical realism that is as thrilling as it is head-scratching.
The most riveting aspect of the book’s second half is Zach’s seamless and easy free fall into real criminality. If you pay close attention in the book’s first half, this possibility was always present. It just needed an environment in which to thrive. And this environment is meticulously detailed in the form of Sukhan’s prison system. Sentenced for marijuana smuggling, Zach finds himself elbows deep in the fish guts of a prison job, devoid of Shanki, and facing down hard time. Of course, his world outlook — already firmly on the losing side — veers criminal under these circumstances. With this setup, a scene where Zach encourages a fellow prisoner who is complaining about a rival to “kill the motherfucker” feels entirely natural. Our boy Zach, a trust fund PacNo orphan, was somehow just born for this.
The magical realism reaches a fever pitch once Zach reaches the Cuttlefish, the island’s notorious maximum-security penitentiary. Here we experience a Bad News Bears-style baseball odyssey, imprisoned international sports heroes, an earthquake, a tsunami, sadistic guards, blood-spattered prison riots, Romeo and Juliet love interests, hidden manuscripts, and dramatic rescues. What we don’t experience, thankfully, is a redemption arc. Not a typical redemption arc, anyway. If anything, on the back half of the novel, Tharp seems to pick apart the stock tenets of the classic prisoner-redemption tale. The delight he takes in doing so is palpable.
Had The Cuttlefish been published in 2012, it could easily have been picked up by Random House. There might have been a movie deal, too. Perhaps Jack Black himself could have been persuaded to play Zach as fate would intend. In 2025, however, The Cuttlefish doesn’t stand a chance. Zach is, after all, a straight male character that writes often about his dick. Although an orphan, he is privileged, with a dwindling trust fund and a hotshot lawyer sister. Although not a classic sex tourist, he does fetishize Asian women and often lovingly mocks the surrounding culture in ways that could, in the wrong hands, be seen as insensitive. But Zach’s ultimate sin is that he is a searcher without a specific purpose. In the words of Zach’s former literary agent, this man “reeks of privilege.” Running From the Crush of It All is the title of his unpublished novel. But running from the crush of what, exactly? It is this question that will exalt The Cuttlefish, along with a slew of similar contemporary novels burgeoning on Substack and other non-sheriffed spaces, into future cult status as the specifics of Zach’s pursuers are slowly but surely revealed. Our Zach is running from the cold hand of a modern culture intent on whitewashing every aspect of life that brings him joy. If they had their way, he would never have left the country, fed instead through the Devil’s conveyer belt into the maw of a PacNo tech career, an impossible glass-and-steel condo mortgage, wildly expensive Asian fusion restaurants, $17 lattes with 40% tip prompts, massive debt, and endless internet scrolling until an undetectable cancer took him out at 61. He may not be entirely aware of it, but this is the “crush” Zach is fleeing, beating back the twin devils of progress and stability one steaming-hot box of Shanki at a time.
Raise a Beer Lai Lai to yet another unsung modern hero.
Daniel Falatko is a New York-based author. His latest novel, The Wayback Machine, is out now.
 | A guest post by
|
Wow. I'm not only honored that you liked the book, but took the time to really get into the guts of the thing. This is the kind of thoughtful review that a writer dreams about. Cheers WBM!
The Cuttlefish is a great read. I did the ESL thing many years ago and reading the book took me right back to those days.