| In the early two-thousands, the New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean travelled to Iceland to visit a former movie star—a performer who, after shooting his most famous role, had gained two thousand pounds. Keiko, a middle-aged orca whale, had played the title character nearly a decade earlier in “Free Willy,” about a young boy’s efforts to release the animal from an amusement park into the wild. Life then imitated art, and the movie’s unexpected popularity led to a campaign to liberate Keiko from the facility where he was then confined, in Mexico City. In “Where’s Willy?,” from 2002, Orlean follows Keiko on his subsequent journey, first to a “gorgeous new $7.3 million tank” in Oregon, and, later, to his home waters off the coast of Iceland, where he had been born sometime during the Carter Administration. The drama of Keiko’s post-Hollywood life unfolds on land and at sea, with key developments involving a telecommunications tycoon and a burst stock-market bubble. But the story’s outcome depends, ultimately, on its biggest character. “Keiko was hardly an exemplary candidate for release,” Orlean reports. “He had been confined for so long, had become so thoroughly accustomed to human contact, and was so much more a diplomat than an executioner that it was hard to imagine him chewing holes in walruses and beating schools of salmon to a pulp with his terrible, awesome tail.” Will Keiko learn to feed himself and find his place in whale society? The story doesn’t end as neatly as a movie, but the protagonist does supply a late-breaking twist. | 
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