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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