Before reading David Vann’s book, there are three things you should know. The first and most important is that, though this is a work of fiction, the suicide of the title was a real one. The somber US edition makes this explicit, up front, in a note on its inside flap. The UK edition, however, omits that note. Vann’s dedication remains — “For My Father, James Edwin Vann, 1940-1980” — but it is now left to the author’s acknowledgements at the end to remove any ambiguity over the fact that his father killed himself.
For sure, it would be an odd reader who had not already come to this conclusion, but it needs to be stated from the outset. There must be no ambiguity, because unless this is clear, the far more profound and shocking ways in which Vann goes on to break
with actuality may be muddled
and diminished.
The second thing you need to know is that this is a collection of stories and not a single narrative. There are several incongruities in the way the UK edition of Legend of a Suicide has been published — packaged between whimsical covers that present Vann’s jagged, desperate act of existential mastery as if it were a flight of magical realism, describing his howl in the dark as a “tender story of loss, survival and disillusioned love.” But there is a more serious distortion. Inside this edition, Vann’s series of five short stories — and one long one — is made to appear as if merged into a continuous novel, with numbered chapter headings.
This has presumably been done on the assumption that British readers are less likely to buy collections of short stories. The result, however, damages Vann’s endeavor, which is to change, from one story to the next, not just perspectives, but events themselves. His fictional alter ego, Roy, is present throughout the book, but in radically altered circumstances. The blurb on the cover says that Roy’s father kills himself on the deck of his boat, which is weirdly misleading. This happens in one story, but not in another.
There is no single death. Though all the stories are connected, there is no single story. The power of Vann’s “legend” emerges from the way a real-world event is imagined, changed and re-imagined as if it were taking place over and again, in parallel but contradictory worlds.
Then there is the third thing you need to know which is, rather, something you must not know. As this book re-imagines its central death, an event occurs that utterly transforms the encounter between protagonist, father, author and reader. Do not let anyone tell you what this event is before you start. To know what happens in advance would be to spoil not just a narrative surprise in a heart-thumping tale, but the entire apparatus Vann has constructed to wrench out the dreadful and meaningless facts of existence, to master them, and, in a violent act of fictional transmogrification, to reconfigure them as something not less, but more real.
David Vann is a young American author whose first book was a memoir, A Mile Down, about how a boat he had built sank in the Caribbean, in a peculiar echo of previous family accidents. He might also, here, have written a memoir of his father’s suicide, but such a memoir, however direct, however honest, however lacerating, could never have reached the psychological depth, the real-world knowledge, of the fiction that he has produced instead.
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