Review: The Dolphin House, by Audrey Schulman
Europa, 2022. 307 pp. $15

In summer 1965, Cora quits her job as a waitress at a men’s club in Tampa, Florida, and buys a one-way ticket to St. Thomas. At twenty-one, she doesn’t know what to do with her life. As a deaf person, she feels at a keen disadvantage in a speaking and hearing world, though her habit of watching in silence allows her to identify danger, especially from men:

Men tended to speak in a deep voice with little emotion. They made statements . . . . They talked at length, assuming all were interested. They didn’t ask questions. Their hair was flattened with grease. They sat with their legs spread as though something in their pants needed the room; perhaps it was all the keys in their pockets, to their homes, their cars, their offices.

With animals, however, she’s completely at ease, having grown up on a farm and worked at a riding stable, where she learned how to get horses to trust her. Consequently, she’s absolutely perfect for the job she walks into on St. Thomas, working with dolphins at a research center established by an ambitious, manipulative Harvard neuroscientist named Blum.

The three researchers have had an artificial lagoon built and study the four dolphins swimming in it, seized from the wild. Oddly, though, the men won’t go in the water, so how can they observe anything? Worse, they perform “surgeries” on the dolphins, and she’s not mollified when Blum tells her that they implant electrodes in their heads. All she knows is that the dolphins scream in terror, and that the procedures leave wounds.

In his ham-fisted way, Blum’s trying to tabulate what dolphins can or can’t do with their large brains—so long as they imitate humans. He hopes to cash in on government grants to scientists studying cognition and make a name for himself. Eventually, he realizes that Cora’s more than an animal trainer in a bathing suit and takes an interest in what she discovers about the dolphins.

But he does so only for his own purposes, and his two colleagues refuse to see her as anything but a sex object. Welcome to the Sixties and the obstacles faced by women in science.

But Cora, who can’t get her hearing aids wet or they’ll short out, must go into the water without them, and what she learns excites her beyond measure. She senses the dolphins’ sounds in her body and studies them much as she observed the horses, focusing on their relationships rather than what they can imitate. She’s the expert, though she lacks the vocabulary to describe what she’s seen.

I love this premise: the woman who can’t hear understands more than the men who can. But what makes The Dolphin House worth reading is the novel’s animal protagonists, the four creatures unwillingly captive to the greed and fantasies of humans. The sequences in which Cora tries to learn their ways and teach them what Blum will recognize as “communication” have a beauty and drama that sweep me away.

The dolphins’ empathy, playfulness, aggression, temper tantrums, and sociability never cease to amaze me. That’s communication, whether or not a human can interpret it. But Blum, chasing ever-larger grants and fame, wants her to teach the dolphins human speech and tells her that’s the only way to spare them the surgeries. And Cora, recognizing this manipulation for what it is but also hungering to be thought of as a researcher rather than just an animal trainer, agrees.

The Dolphin House has a wide scope. Besides the science, which Schulman introduces with a light hand, the novel asks what real communication is. Those who can hear define it as words, which these scientists assume is the superior way.

None of these guys possesses an ounce of poetry or sense of drama, nor does any man in the book understand the physical world, for all their study of it. That’s Cora’s realm, but to one scientist in particular, if he can’t tabulate something, it doesn’t exist. Right there, that says a lot.

Where I have trouble is how far Schulman seems to wish to take this division between the sensitive, feeling Cora and every man she meets, only one of whom has any decency or even a positive trait. The others are greedy, lecherous, exploitive, narcissistic, and denigrate women; two seem like rapists waiting their chance to strike. Cora senses that none would have the faintest idea how to pleasure a woman, assuming they even think it a worthwhile goal.

This blanket portrayal goes far beyond the sexism-in-science theme or even the sexism of the Sixties. Schulman could have made the same points without fashioning her male characters out of straw so that they’re easier to knock down. I also wonder why the physically adept Cora never tries to defend herself against passes, looking only to escape. She seldom pushes back against verbal insults or injustices, either, though she’s not the type to think “a lady wouldn’t say that.” So she’s too much one way as well.

All the same, The Dolphin House is a brilliant novel, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.