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.
With his opening story, Ichthyology, Vann unveils Roy’s Alaskan family background, some of his father’s failures, one account of the suicide, and inserts an eerily symbolic description of silver-dollar fish sucking out the eyes of an iridescent shark. The details feel acutely true, both literally and emotionally, but apart from the one biographical fact you know about Vann, you have no idea precisely what has been recorded and what has been invented. The feeling of memoir metamorphosing into fiction cocoons an entire sense of reality as Roy investigates his mother and father, their divorce, his stepmother and his father’s infidelities. Roy explains himself with a taut and quivering emotional control that at first merely hints of, and only occasionally lurches into, the psychological wilderness surrounding everything.
And then in the central story of the book, Sukkwan Island, that wilderness opens up. A 13-year-old Roy is taken to a remote Alaskan hut by his father and it becomes clear that the father is using the son in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to rebuild his life and stave off the encroaching dark. Roy listens in the night as his father weeps, cringes, confesses his sexual cravings, jabbers his delusions, begs his son for forgiveness. Roy does not have the mental equipment to interpret this, nor is there another soul for miles around. Psychological and physical survival become the same thing.
Without striking any hysterical notes, Vann’s writing gradually marks out a score of unholy human pain. There are hints of Hemingway in the control of the style, but the tide and undertow of its meaning are Dostoevskian. Father and son cannot leave this place. You, the reader, will not be able to leave it either.
Vann inhabits and possesses his father’s shame-diseased, dying, subjective experience, claiming it — appallingly — as his own. You draw breath at the daring of it. The stakes are high. There is no border here between external and internal realities; this is a book that must already have changed things in the author’s world. What of Vann’s family? What of his mother? What of the other women in his father’s life, whom he evokes and implicates and hands over for judgment? Are they also his to possess?
Vann’s legend is, at once, the truest memoir and the purest fiction. You need to know it is based on facts to understand just how far he has gone in creating a new reality. But you also need to remain ignorant of the fictional surprise he has in store, so that it can hit you with the full force of new knowledge. Nothing quite like this book has been written before.
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