The Whale Chaser

The Whale Chaser is the story of Vince Sansone, the eldest child and only son in a large Italian-American family. He must come to terms with the consequences of his own actions as well as his family's version of la storia segreta, the unspoken story of how his grandfather, like thousands of other Italians and Italian Americans, was evacuated from prohibited zones on the West Coast and, like hundreds of others, was interned in a prison camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Set in the turbulent decades of the Vietnam war and the drug and hippie counterculture, The Whale Chaser is a powerful story about the possibility of redemption.
— Chicago Review Press

"Ardizzone's latest novel stretches over decades and miles, from the crowded North Side of Chicago to the haunting waters of British Columbia. The book sends home the complicated, elusive beauty of the struggle toward self-comprehension—with insights as illuminating and breathtaking as a whale's sudden breach."
— Angela Pneuman

"The Whale Chaser is a masterful merger of story and history, metaphor and metaphysics, explanation and confession. Ardizzone's eye, ear and recollection are incredible; the story is not merely set in Catholic Chicago in the 1960s or in the counter-culture haven of Vancouver Island in the 1970s, it recreates those places and times—idiom, states of mind, complexities of custom and religion and expectation and desperation. His precise language more than describes; it turns scenes of both violence and love into incredible experiences. And the voice of his character, Vince Sansone, is so note-perfect it is hard to remember this is fiction, not memoir. Vince's hard-won wisdom is so naturally expressed one hopes he is really out there, sailing with the whales, showing the tourists something that will take them out of themselves, if only for a moment."
— David Bradley

"This lyrical, engaging novel is sensual, suspenseful, and full of crackling life. Tony Ardizzone, above all, is a marvelous chronicler of the joys of being alive. There's plenty of peril too, and suspense, the human tragicomedy in all its nuanced complexity."
  — Christine Sneed

"“How powerful the urge to escape! At home Vince Sansone struggles for space among three damaged immigrant generations in a single Chicago brownstone, while in the streets the ‘60s exert their own formidable pressures. Yet once Vince escapes, how powerful the remorse! So his story cartwheels back and forth between straight America and hippie Canada, between monsters from the last World War and contemporary freaks and shrieks. Out of the biplay emerges a big, two-hearted odyssey. Each port of call comes across with stirring brio, because each brings us discoveries of both the knockabout world and the raging leviathins within. With The Whale Chaser Tony Ardizzone has achieved his masterpiece, and at the same time—off-handedly, with true sprezzatura—one of the two or three greatest novels ever of the Italian-American quandary.”
  — John Domini

"The Whale Chaser begins and ends with a moment of transcendence. . . Novelist Tony Ardizzone moves seamlessly between the pre-Vatican II American Midwest and Tofino, British Columbia, of the late 1970s. . . It is under these skies that Vincent seeks forgiveness from those he has wronged over the years. Some ignore him, while others react with anger. Yet this element of the novel is positively sacramental. Of forgiveness, Vincent wonders, 'Does life offer us any greater grace?' The Whale Chaser is a tale of a man’s continual chase for both self and soul."
   — U. S. Catholic

"Impressively well written from beginning to end, The Whale Chaser is a complex and deftly written novel that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself is finished and set back upon the shelf. Tony Ardizzone is an exceptional novelist, and The Whale Chaser is very highly recommended."
  — Midwest Book Review