Legend Of A Suicide: Stories [Paperback]

 

 

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This was David Vann's first book of fiction and is comprised of five short stories and a novella. The stories are fictional but as David Vann states in the acknowledgements: `They're fictional, but are based on a lot that's true'. The book is dedicated to James Vann, David's father, who committed suicide in 1980 when David was aged 13 years.

Each reader can decide for themselves where and how firm a line to draw between the historical James Edwin Vann and the novel's James Edwin Fenn, and between David Vann and the novel's narrator and protagonist Roy Fenn. For me, the firmness of the line mattered less than the exploration of suicide and its impacts.

The stories and the novella are linked through Roy and his relationship to his father Jim, a restless man in search of self-fulfilment who is unable to deal with frustration and failure. The first three stories provide aspects of Roy's early life: the small child in Ketchikan, Alaska, leaves for California and a new life with his mother. Jim's suicide occurs during the first story; the remaining short stories revolve around Roy's adjustment to both the fact and consequences, both as a child and then years later when he returns to Ketchikan.

But the short stories set a series of scenes over which the novella `Sukkwan Island' towers. This is a different exploration of the fact and impact of suicide and while I did not enjoy this story, I admire the power of it. The impact of the story is amplified by its setting. Sukkwan Island may have its own rugged beauty but it is an isolated and isolating place. Especially for Roy and Jim who are haunted by their own inner demons. This is a story that builds as Jim's lack of planning and unrealistic expectations feed into Roy's growing sense of dread. This story could stand alone, but I think this would reduce its impact, its reminder that suicide has an impact beyond a singular sudden death. Stories form their own reality.

It's almost an anticlimax, after `Sukkwan Island', to return to the final two stories. It's both reassuring and slightly unreal to return to Ketchikan with an older Roy.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I admired the writing and the way in which the Alaskan settings enhanced and amplified the stories. I admired, too, the way in which David Vann explores the difficult terrain of suicide. But I found the stories unsettling, and while this is partly a consequence of the power of the writing it is also related to the role of the writer as both storyteller and orphaned child.

`Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Whether or not you know about the author's personal context (touched on in the Acknowledgements) that led him to write this deeply affecting and thought provoking collection of stories, the title itself implies that it will be anything but an "easy read". Not a book I would have picked up without strong recommendations. Five short stories, structurally grouped around the substantial and central novella, are linked together through Roy and his relationship to his father Jim, a former dentist turned luckless commercial fisherman and wilderness hunter in the wilds of Alaska.

David Vann uses the first three stories to set out in brief the backdrop for Roy's early life, from living as a small child in Ketchikan, Alaska, to leaving for California to a different life with his mother. Already in the first story we learn that the father, not able to cope with the realization of his various plans and ventures, forgoes his "many lives": on his ship, he takes a gun and commits suicide. The last two stories are set many years later and see Roy return to Ketchikan to attempt to reconnect with the memories of his father and to confront his own lingering and conflicting emotions that he carried since his childhood.

The writing in the short stories is detached and even young Roy's psychological turmoil is told in somewhat oblique tones. The emotional and imaginative power of Vann's writing, however, blows into the reader's face like an Arctic storm as soon as the novella, "Sukkwan Island" begins. Thirteen-year old Roy has accepted his father's invitation to spend a year with him "homesteading" in a cabin on this remote island in south-eastern Alaska. Intended to enable father and son to get to know each other better, they embark on an adventure neither of them could have imagined. Vann's evocation of the landscape's harsh and rugged beauty, the deep isolation that sets human beings against the natural elements and the dangers looming in the wild, is thoroughly captivating as it is intimate and personal. The daily challenges posed by the outer environment are reflecting deeply on the psychological dramas inside: neither son nor father seem to be able to confront their demons or fears.

Vann depicts the interplay between environment and human soul in this example magnificently: "The cloud enclosed him and his father in their own sound so that he could hear his own breath and the blood in his temples as if it were outside of him and this too increased his sense of being watched, even hunted. His father's footsteps just ahead of him sounded enormous. The fear spread through him until he was holding his breath in tight gasps and couldn't ask to go back."

Occasional physical successes, such as building the food cache or hauling in a good catch of fish result in positive energy, spreading temporary relief also to the reader. However, these glimpses of relaxation are alternating with longer and longer periods of deep despair and hopelessness until events reach the unavoidable climactic action. Nothing will be the same after that. Nothing is as expected or anticipated. From then on the story follows the dramatic aftermath and fall-out from the suicide. The poignant intensity of the experienced told in the novel's second part challenges our understanding of the resilience of the human mind when faced with mental illness and extreme crises.

With LEGEND OF A SUICIDE Vann has created one of the most intensely imagined, deeply moving portrait of a father-son pair who, in their effort to become closer through spending time together in a remote wilderness, fail completely. They are totally unprepared as they struggle for survival in this environment, risking their lives more than once, due to lack of knowledge, confusion and Jim's inability to address his deep despair and emotional and physical pain. At times, especially in the second part, I found some sections too drawn out or, for me, too much beyond the believable and therefore less than convincing. After finishing the intense and highly charged narrative in the novella, I found myself less connected to two last stories of the book. While they picked up the thread to the earlier short stories, the interruption in the narrative flow, created by central novella, was so profound that it rendered the rest less meaningful for me. Noticing that "Sukkwan Island" is being offered as a stand alone novella, I can easily see the attraction of reading it as a separate piece of fiction and let the power of it carry the reader into a different world. [Friederike Knabe]

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