Remarkably Bright Creatures

ELI5/TLDR

A seventy-year-old cleaning lady at a small-town aquarium strikes up a friendship with a giant Pacific octopus who is smarter than anyone realizes. The octopus, counting down the days of his four-year life span, figures out something the humans around him cannot: that the aimless thirty-year-old drifter who just took over the cleaning job is the biological grandson of the woman who’s been talking to him through the glass every night. The octopus spends his remaining strength trying to get them to see it. It takes him dying to pull it off.

The Full Story

An octopus who considers himself the smartest creature in the building

The book opens with a voice you don’t forget. Marcellus McSquiddles — named by a toddler, to his eternal mortification — is a giant Pacific octopus held captive at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. He has been there for 1,299 days. He can read the plaque on his tank. He is not pleased with his accommodations.

My name is Marcellus, but most humans do not call me that. Typically, they call me that guy. For example: Look at that guy — there he is — you can just see his tentacles behind the rock. I am a giant Pacific octopus. I know this from the plaque on the wall beside my enclosure.

I know what you are thinking. Yes, I can read. I can do many things you would not expect.

Marcellus narrates in short chapters scattered through the novel, addressed directly to the reader, with the droll superiority of a tenured professor forced to explain things to undergraduates. He has three hearts, half a billion neurons distributed among his eight arms, and a collection of stolen trinkets hidden in a cranny of his tank: glass marbles, credit cards, a human tooth, single earrings. He escapes nightly through a gap in his tank he’d prefer you not mention to anyone. He steals sea cucumbers. He considers herring beneath him.

One might make a third list here, which would consist of things humans clamor for, but most intelligent life would consider entirely unfit for consumption. For example: every last offering in the vending machine in the lobby.

The humor lives in the precision. He counts the number of times visitors say “Can you believe this weather we’re having?” (1,910 times, one and a half per day on average.) He delivers a brief, devastating analysis of human communication skills, noting that even a herring can tell which way its school is turning. He catalogues fingerprints on his tank glass the way a connoisseur studies paintings.

Fingerprints are like keys, with their specific shape. I remember all of them.

But underneath the wit, Marcellus is dying. He knows it. He has at most 160 days left, and the number shrinks with every chapter heading. This gives every one of his wry observations a quiet urgency he never quite acknowledges.

A woman who cleans because she cannot stop

Tova Sullivan is seventy, weighs ninety pounds, and mops the aquarium floors every night with a vinegar-and-lemon solution she brings from home because the industrial cleaner reminded her of her husband’s hospital room. She greets every tank on her rounds. She has opinions about trash-bag technique. She is, in every visible way, a woman who has organized her grief into a series of tasks and intends to die with the baseboards clean.

Her son, Erik, drowned at eighteen in the summer of 1989. Took a small boat out one night from the ferry dock where he worked, and never came back. The anchor rope was cut clean. The police called it suicide. Tova has never believed that. Not for one minute.

Her husband, Will, died of cancer a few years ago. Her brother, Lars, just died in a nursing home she never visited. Her circle of friends — the Knit-Wits — is shrinking. She is methodically dismantling her life: selling her house, applying to a retirement village in Bellingham. Getting her affairs in order the way she gets everything in order, with black ink and the correct forms.

She understands what it means to never be able to stop moving, lest you find yourself unable to breathe.

The night she discovers Marcellus tangled in power cords in the break room, something shifts. She frees him. He wraps a tentacle around her arm and studies her with his unearthly eye. He returns her lost house key. She starts talking to him — really talking, not just saying hello — and he listens in a way that nothing else in her life does.

Of all the impossible things.

A guy who can’t hold a job but can identify floorboard grain

Cameron Cassmore is thirty, broke, recently dumped, and sleeping on his best friend’s couch in Modesto. His mother abandoned him at nine. He was raised by his Aunt Jeanne, who lives in a trailer park, collects junk, and recently contracted chlamydia from a man named Wally Perkins. Cameron has never met his father.

In a box of his mother’s old things, he finds a class ring engraved EELS from Sowell Bay High School, class of 1989, wrapped in a photo of his mother with a man named Simon Brinks. Brinks is now a wealthy Seattle real estate developer. Cameron books a five-a.m. flight, convinced he’s about to shake down his deadbeat dad for eighteen years of child support.

Western Washington is the wettest place in America, and Simon Brinks is about to make it rain cash money.

Everything goes wrong immediately. The airline loses his luggage (it ends up in Naples, Italy). He buys a camper that smells like urine. He gets a flat tire. He cannot find Simon Brinks. He ends up, through a chain of small-town coincidences, working at the Sowell Bay Aquarium — chopping bait, mopping floors, and being supervised in absentia by a tiny Swedish woman who has strong feelings about polyester streaks on glass.

Cameron is exasperating and endearing in roughly equal measure. He quotes Shakespeare accidentally, retains random knowledge about snakes and floorboard grains and snack-cake chemistry, and has no idea how smart he is. He got a full scholarship to community college once and never filled out the forms.

The octopus sees what the humans cannot

The book’s central mystery is not really a mystery. The reader figures it out long before the characters do, which is the point. Cameron’s mother, Daphne Cassmore, was the girl Erik Sullivan was secretly seeing the summer he died. Cameron was born the following February. Erik is Cameron’s father. Tova is Cameron’s grandmother. They’ve been cleaning the same building together for weeks without knowing it.

Marcellus knows. He’s known since Cameron first walked past his tank, because he can read heredity the way he reads fingerprints: the gait, the heart-shaped dimple on the left cheek, the greenish-golden flecks in each pair of eyes.

The former cleaning woman and her replacement. They walk alike.

He spends his final days trying to get them to see it. He steals Cameron’s driver’s license from Terry’s desk in a late-night mission that nearly kills him, and tucks it under the bronze sea lion statue where Tova always cleans — because she’s the only one who does. He retrieves Erik’s class ring from the wolf eel tank where Cameron threw it in frustration, and deposits it on the lobby floor, where Tova finds him crumpled and pale on her last night of work.

I could go on with more evidence, although now, I must rest. These communications exhaust me, and this one is getting very long. But you would do well to believe me when I tell you this: the young male who has recently taken over sanitation duties is a direct descendant of the cleaning woman with the injured foot.

Misunderstandings, almost-departures, and the long way home

Cameron meets Brinks. Brinks was his mother’s best friend, not her lover. The ring isn’t his. Cameron’s father remains unknown. In a spiral of disappointment — the meeting, Avery’s apparent ghosting (her teenage son sabotaged the message), Ethan’s well-meaning meddling, Terry not offering the permanent job — Cameron writes a resignation note and heads for California.

He makes it to Northern California before the serpentine belt snaps. He fixes it himself, using the replacement belt that’s been sitting in the glove box the entire time, and turns the camper around.

Tova, meanwhile, finds the ring on the floor next to the dying Marcellus. EELS. Erik Ernest Lindgren Sullivan. The gears click. She wheels Marcellus in a mop bucket down to the jetty and releases him into the sea. Then she sits on her bench and stares at the water, processing the fact that she has a grandson.

“You led me to him. My grandson.” Her voice falters on these last two words, but a warmth seeps through her at the same time. Two words she never thought she’d say.

Cameron appears on her doorstep the next morning. She hands him the ring. She tells him his father’s name.

“I have a grandmother.”

“Well, how about that?” She laughs, and it’s as if a valve inside her has been released. “I have a grandson.”

Marcellus goes home

His final chapter is short and beautiful. Released into the cold dark water, he sinks, then his limbs awaken, and he swims. Down to the bottom of Puget Sound, where he once found a key as a juvenile — the same key he later returned to Tova. Where the long-disintegrated remains of a beloved son lie scattered among the rocks.

How does it feel, you ask? It is comfortable. It is home. I am lucky. I am grateful.

He stops at the barrel of his replacement on his way out, peeks at her. She’s young and badly injured and terrified. But she’ll have Tova.

Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.

After all

Tova does not go to Charter Village. She buys a waterfront condo. Cameron stays in Sowell Bay, works construction, plans to take engineering classes. He wears his father’s class ring. Ethan comes for dinner in Cameron’s old Moth Sausage T-shirt, finally returned in his long-lost luggage from Italy. Avery will bring pie later. There is Scrabble. There is a bronze octopus statue outside the aquarium, paid for by Tova’s donation.

The book ends with Tova at the railing, whispering to the water: “I miss you. Both of you.” Then she turns back to the others. There’s a game to win, after all.

Claude’s Take

This is a book that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s a feel-good novel about grief, connection, and an octopus who is smarter than everyone in the room. It is warm the way a blanket is warm — not because it generates heat, but because it traps what’s already there.

What works well: Marcellus. He’s the book’s whole gambit, and it pays off. The octopus narration is funny, precise, and genuinely touching without ever tipping into sentimentality. Van Pelt gives him exactly the right voice — imperious but tender, alien but comprehensible. His countdown chapters create real tension in a book that otherwise has very little. The scene where he drags Cameron’s driver’s license to the sea lion statue, nearly dying in the process, is the novel’s quiet climax, and it lands.

Tova is also well-drawn. Her grief expresses itself through compulsive tidiness in a way that feels true rather than quirky. The scene where she cleans Ethan’s kitchen, ruins his irreplaceable concert T-shirt, and then drives to Tukwila to buy a replacement on the internet — a woman who doesn’t have email — is the kind of character work that earns real affection.

What’s less strong: the mystery. The reader knows Cameron is Erik’s son roughly three hundred pages before any character figures it out. Van Pelt plays fair — the clues are there — but the dramatic irony goes on long enough that you start willing the characters to catch up. Cameron’s plotline runs a little long; the repeated dead ends in his search for Brinks are individually well-written but cumulatively predictable.

The book is also, by design, gentle. Nobody is truly cruel. Every problem resolves. Ethan is kind, Terry is kind, Avery is kind, the Knit-Wits are kind. Even the minor characters — the realtor, the bartender, the airline agent — are mostly decent. This is either a feature or a bug depending on what you want from fiction. Van Pelt is writing comfort, and she’s good at it, but the absence of real darkness means the emotional stakes cap out at a certain height. Tova’s grief is the deepest thing in the book, and it’s handled with restraint, but the novel never quite earns the gut-punch that, say, a Joan Didion or an Elizabeth Strout would deliver from similar material.

The Simon Brinks meeting is the novel’s best surprise — Cameron prepared for a confrontation and instead gets a man who loved his mother, can’t help him, and pours him a beer. That scene has genuine emotional complexity. More of that sharpness would have elevated the whole book.

Still: a well-crafted debut, a memorable narrator, and a plot that delivers its payoff cleanly. The octopus carries it, and the octopus is worth the read.

claude_score: 7 — A good book that does what it sets out to do. The octopus narration is a genuine invention. The emotional resolution is satisfying. It doesn’t quite push past “warm and well-made” into “unforgettable,” but it comes closer than most novels that try for this register.