


On a sentence level, “Legend of a Suicide” is stunning. Vann’s stories are propelled by long runs of seemingly simple sentences, as in this passage from the novella “Sukkwan Island,” which we’re reading this week: “But put back into it, the air was colder and the plants were lush but still only plants and he wondered how they would pass the time. Everything was sharply itself and nothing else.” The “it” in the sentence is the Alaskan wilderness, to which the young protagonist Roy has moved with his father. Alaska terrifies Roy because the objects he sees, the trees, the plants, the animals, the mist, the water, and the snow are not representations or metaphors or symbols, but simply things. For a writer or artist (and Roy seems often to stand in for the author) objects deprived of their illustrative power would be strange and potentially horrifying. Yet this is a sneaky phrase, since Vann uses all of those things in nature in a variety of writerly ways—animals represent human emotions, the approach of winter suggests a danger not only physical, but psychological as well.

This is to say that Vann’s direct style in fact hides remarkable subtlety; seemingly straightforward sentences mean what they say, and sometimes the opposite of what they say as well. To go backwards a bit, take his descriptions of Roy’s parents in the collection’s first story, “Ichthyology.” Within that story’s first few paragraphs, the protagonist and narrator Roy defines his parents, each with a single sentence. Of his mother, he writes: “Given enough information, my mother has never made the wrong choice.” He offers a similarly concise working definition of his father: “Unlike my mother, he had neither eyes nor ears for matters below the surface.” At first, these descriptions seem too tidy, and almost trite. Such pronouncements in fiction can be obvious and off-putting, false and over-determined. Yet a closer look reveals superior depth.

Throughout the book Roy’s mother makes all sorts of wrong choices. You could say she makes very few good choices. Most conspicuously, in the story “A Legend of Good Men,” she runs through a series of unsuitable or unavailable men, and after her divorce from Roy’s father, a man who would top any list of bad choices. As it appears early in the story, the line seems to identify that this mother will be the level-headed caregiver in a set of narratives full of people who need care. Instead, her mistakes throughout the stories point back to the ominously conditional tense of the sentence’s opening: “Given enough information…” In these stories, as in life I suppose, we are rarely given all the information we need.

As for the father, the poor, doomed father—a loaded gun, a ticking time bomb, or any other number of violent metaphors would describe him—Roy observes that he had no sense “for matters below the surface.” This is true: he forgets to put the drain plugs in his new boat and so it sinks, and later he is so enveloped in his own depression that he fails to see the mounting rage in his son, and disaster strikes. The phrase “below the surface” is a clever one, since it connects with the nautical bent of stories full of oceans, ships, and fish. But the various narratives of the father that follow in “Legend of a Suicide” also suggest that he might live entirely beneath the surface, and that his real failing is to have eyes and ears only for what’s there, way down in his own tortured depths, and not the real life above.

Subscribe to The New Yorker