FICTION: Legend of a Suicide, By David Vann, Penguin, 230pp, £7.99
A FATHER’S eventual suicide becomes the final act of a slow, ongoing process of death. Roy, the narrator, recalls the various stages of self-destruction and how closely it was bound up with a dying marriage.
“My father was serving two years as a dentist in the Navy: he had wanted Alaska because he liked hunting and fishing, but he obviously had not known about Adak at the time of his request.” Adak is a remote island, “a small hunk of rock and snow far out on the Aleutian chain at the edge of the Bering Sea.” It is cold and inhospitable, exactly the type of place to push a fragile mind over the edge.
Roy knows what he is talking about, he was born on this island, in fact being born almost killed him, but his resourceful mother saved him. David Vann’s first book which was published quietly in the US last year by the University of Massachusetts Press, makes its British debut with all the hype of a second coming. Bold, ill-advised comparisons have been made with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, small wonder that one approaches it as if it were a sacred text. The subject is powerful, the death of a father as recalled by a son who has never recovered from the grief and the horror.
Jim the father is trapped within his own disappointment and battles conflicting states of despair and euphoria. He buys a cabin cruiser. “Still wearing his dental smock beneath his jacket, he launched the boat late on a Friday afternoon as we cheered from shore. He slipped it into its stall in the docks, and the next morning he stood on the edge of those docks looking down thirty feet through clear, icy Alaskan waters to where the Snow Goose sat like a white mirage on the rounded grey stones.” The boat had sunk because the father, the man with a poor attention to detail, had forgotten to put in the drain plugs.
The dramatic opening section of Vann’s book promises much and prepares the way for what seems likely to follow, an intense account of a crack-up. The narrator recalls lying in a sleeping bag, listening to his father’s doomed attempts to sleep, “and sensed, with the assurance children sometimes have, that he would not be my father for much longer.” The picture quickly emerges of a man so preoccupied with his private hell he makes no effort to shield his son. Calmly the narrator, Roy, the son, imagines what it was like when his father shot himself “under a heavy, grey-white sky” leaving his family to survive.
Vann is not writing a conventional narrative, this becomes obvious as the second sequence opens and adopts a different approach to the telling. Here the marriage has failed but his father is alive and about to marry a much younger woman. Again the narrative voice is direct, the tone detached – as if Roy has deliberately set out to piece together the story by drawing on his memory of the events. The story takes on a life of its own because the new wife, Rhoda, is unusual and comes complete with her own set of problems.
Early in this sequence Vann establishes a device which he will use throughout, a reliance on violent imagery. This book is awash with disturbing ritual violence and blood. The newly weds give the boy presents: from the bride comes a Walkman; Dad produces the boy’s first gun and tells him to aim it at a squirrel eating in a nearby tree. “I pulled the trigger and saw a chunk of meat fly from him [the squirrel] like a small red bird. He seemed to explode. There was the sound of rain through the trees as bits of him fell back to earth.”
Legend of a Suicide– perhaps legacy might have been a better choice of word – is daunting and shocking, if not all that convincing. Its lack of narrative cohesion becomes a far greater weakness than it should be, considering the seriousness of the subject. The book consists of six self-contained stories and while Vann, when writing in the first person does succeed in conveying the expected tone of resentful bewilderment, the book does fail as a narrative because of the lengthy, novella-like fourth section, "Sukkwan Island '', which is written in the third person. Not only does this fail to sustain the immediacy he appears to have created through the first three sequences, it also gives a dark twist to the suicide story he appeared to have set out to tell.
The father and son set out to live in the wilderness. The father is obviously cracking up and no longer treats his son as a child. Instead the boy is subjected to the full range of the adult father’s regrets, including his sexual ones. It is as if the son has become a drinking buddy. All the while the story appears to be leading up to the father’s suicide. Instead the son, Roy, blasts his own head off and he is discovered by the father. More confused than grief-stricken the father begins a chaotic journey which includes bringing the boy’s body with him. In time the unburied corpse begins to smell. The father, who is then arrested for murder, emerges as more ridiculous than tragic.
This fourth section is an odd performance; curious enough on its own if mainly because the writing tends towards the grotesque, but more curious still because of its disconnected role within the book. Vann seems to be working within variations of the given theme and is experimenting with style and mood – not to mention the crucial change of voice.
Neither memoir nor cohesive fictional narrative, anyone thinking that Legend of a Suicideis approaching the magnificence of Richard Ford's Wildlife(1990) or William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow(1980) will be disappointed.
To have read Vann’s book as it was initially published – as promising work from a small US press – is to be fair to it. By contrast its arrival in Europe with the full force of hype, as a paperback original, has merely resulted in highlighting its uneven work-in-progress quality. In Vann we have a writer trying out styles; in his somewhat random book we have all the sketchiness of someone working towards that style.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent ofThe Irish Times
