This, from his sojourn in Australia, is a typical example: “We sold the car for two hundred dollars to a bunch of Yugoslavian bauxite miners. He slept in beachside hammocks to avoid snakes. This was before every good wave in the world had been discovered and mapped, before surf cams, buoy data, and Google Earth. At one point he traveled around the world, à la “Endless Summer,’’ on an “open-ended wave chase” that lasted four years.

He didn’t get a checking account until he was 31. Much of Finnegan’s story involves real backpacking, the poste-restante life on the road. But Finnegan, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, writes so engagingly that you paddle alongside, eager for him to take you to the next wave. Wave chasers, ski bums, river rafters - these people driven by their private will to adventure can seem like narcissists. In “Barbarian Days,’’ William Finnegan’s great new memoir, the driving force is his passionate, almost primal attachment to surfing.Ī 447-page navel-gaze at the surfing life could have been the literary equivalent of a horizon-blotting, two-wave hold-down. Whether it is Laurie Lee searching for answers about his upbringing in an isolated Cotswolds village in “Cider with Rosie,” Rian Malan trying to understand the intersection of family and apartheid in “My Traitor’s Heart,’’ or Annie Dillard looking at wilderness in “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’’ some of the best memoirs of any era are the ones where the writers are working out not just what they care about, but why. Obsession is often what separates memoir from autobiography.

Barbarian Days by William Finnegan