Watching his dentist-turned-fisherman father veer closer and closer
to suicide, the adolescent narrator of David Vann‘s short story
“Ichthyology” “sensed, with the assurance children have, that he would
not be my father much longer.” His latest relationship crumbling, in
debt to the IRS, having lost $100,000 in a single screwed-up halibut
season, the doomed man “had entered the last beautiful, desperate,
far-ranging circlings of his life.”
Vann’s own father killed himself when Vann was young — so it
was both easy and hard to write about how the distraught fictional Jim
“took his ’44 Magnum handgun from the cabin and walked back to stand
alone on the bright silver stern” of the boat he was about to lose,
then “spattered himself among the entrails of salmon.” Jim’s sad story
replays from various angles throughout Vann’s collection Legend of a
Suicide, which was shortlisted for the Story Prize and is one of
The New York Times‘ hundred Notable Books of 2008. “What
I love about writing most is its power to transform the worst moments
of a life into something redeemed and even sometimes lovely,” reflects
the author, who will be at Books Inc. (1344 Park St., Alameda)
on Thursday, January 29. “I tried for a long time to write about my
father’s suicide, and the attempts were all too direct, too thin, too
mean.” Finding inspiration in Marilynne Robinson’s novel
Housekeeping, he wrote “Ichthyology” in less than 24 hours,
“after years of failure.” It’s the most strictly autobiographical tale
in a book whose crowning novella, “Sukkwan Island,” features spot-on
renderings of a head blown off — only this time, the head
isn’t Jim’s. Vann brings a rare and irresistible elegance to viscera,
as in this description of a boy’s aquarium: “Everything in human life
was to be found in that tank. Yellow-and-black angelfish floated
delicately by, all glamour and glitz, while behind them trailed their
waste in streamers. Suckers at the bottom of the tank ate this waste,
spat it out in disgust, and roved on.” Within minutes of being placed
into the tank, two new fish drew up on either side of another that had
particularly protuberant eyes. The new arrivals “were slick and
merciless and knew how to work as a team. In one quick flash each went
for an eye and sucked it out. They didn’t even swallow, but let the
round, billiard-ball eyes float dreamily down to the rocks.”
For the author, “the worst and most debilitating parts of suicide
bereavement faded over time, but I’m shocked by how the love remains. I
still love my father, as much as I did while he was alive, and I have
no idea how that can happen. I don’t understand how it’s possible
almost thirty years later.” Just summoning these words, he says,
“brings tears. And how can that be?” 7:30 p.m. BooksInc.net
