American novelist David Vann has returned to the suicide of his father.Credit:Philippe Matsas
A fictional stand-in for Vann’s father,a dentist named Jim,was also central to his second work of fiction,the novelCaribou Island,which mined the material of a second family trauma:nearly a year before his father’s suicide,Vann’s stepmother’s mother killed her husband and then herself,after their marriage was revealed as a lie.
Vann’s first two books were tightly controlled,intricately plotted masterpieces about the way emotional trauma can knit itself through lives:decision by decision,generation after generation. They lived through perfect details;descriptions in which physical landscapes reflected the characters’ emotional ones,as well as beautifully juxtaposed observations or lines of dialogue that expertly revealed characters’ moments of connection and disconnection,the dreams and delusions that motivated them.
Halibut on the Moon by David Vann.Credit:
Halibut on the Moon is Vann’s first return to this material since his novelGoat Mountain (2013),a psychologically terrifying exploration of a boy’s arrival into manhood through an intergenerational hunt,intended as the last in a loose trilogy inspired by Vann’s violent family history.
From the opening pages,as Jim Vann arrives at a California airport from Alaska,delivered into the care of his brother (under his psychiatrist’s instructions),he is obsessed with his gun (“a Ruger .44 magnum,the one Dirty Harry used”),furiously self-pitying and blindly ruled by his emotions and appetites.
“Why does anyone think they can control what they feel?” he reflects. A few pages later:“A gun demands to be used … it’s in the nature of the thing itself,and it matches something inside Jim,some anger that the world wasn’t put together right,that all rules were meant to screw him from the start.” And we’re off,on a meandering road-trip through California to visit all the people Jim has loved – brother,parents,children,ex-wives – who repeatedly,almost uniformly,tell him that they love him and that he’s “a good person”,a qualification the reader sees no evidence of in this book.