The Story in Brief
Tova Sullivan is a seventy-year-old widow who cleans the Sowell Bay Aquarium on the night shift and has quietly stopped expecting much from the world. Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus who lives in the aquarium, observes everything, and understands considerably more than the humans around him realise. Van Pelt's debut became one of the great word-of-mouth successes of recent years — a novel about loneliness, grief, and the unlikely forms that comfort can take. The Netflix adaptation stars Sally Field as Tova, with Olivia Newman directing.
Key Differences
Marcellus's point of view
The novel alternates between Tova's chapters and Marcellus's — and the octopus chapters are the book's great achievement. Van Pelt gives Marcellus an intelligence that is alien without being unrecognisable: precise, unsentimental, occasionally very funny. The film reportedly uses voiceover to preserve some of this, but a narrating octopus risks anthropomorphism in ways the novel carefully avoids by staying inside Marcellus's genuinely different logic.
The mystery plot
The novel has a dual-storyline structure — Tova's friendship with Marcellus runs alongside a separate thread involving a young man searching for his biological family. The two plots converge slowly, and the convergence is the novel's emotional payoff. A linear film handles this structural rhythm differently; the convergence tends to feel more engineered and less inevitable on screen.
Tova's grief
Van Pelt writes Tova's widowhood and the loss of her son with great restraint — the grief is present in everything she does without being directly stated. Field's ability to convey decades of quiet sorrow in a single expression is exactly what this material needs, and this may be one area where the film matches or exceeds the page.
Octopus cognition
One of the novel's pleasures is how seriously Van Pelt takes what it would actually be like to think as an octopus — the alien priorities, the lack of sentimentality, the different relationship to time. The film's version of Marcellus, however well-rendered, will inevitably be shaped by what audiences can follow and emotionally access, which means some of that genuine otherness gets softened.
Should You Read First?
Yes — the novel is warm, funny, and quick. Van Pelt's prose has none of the literary fiction pomposity that sometimes makes word-of-mouth phenomena feel like homework. Marcellus's perspective is the book's great invention, and experiencing it on the page first means the film's version of him will feel like a translation rather than a replacement. It is exactly as good as everyone told you it was.
The novel is the richer experience — Marcellus's perspective is the book's great invention, and it works best in prose. But this is exactly the kind of quiet, character-driven story the right cast elevates, and Field makes the film worth watching regardless. Read first, then see what she does with Tova.