For a man whose life and writing have been riven by a singular personal tragedy, David Vann is a surprisingly cheerful fellow, I'm relieved to discover. As we eat lunch in a wood-panelled diner in a small town just outside San Francisco, almost anything, but particularly his own foibles and misadventures, can reduce the writer to paroxysms of infectious laughter. For instance, Vann, who for a while had his own charter sailing business and was planning to circumnavigate the globe, is enormously amused, as am I, that he managed to get completely lost within seconds of picking me up at the airport in his car. Now he’s laughing because he’s just launched what he knows is a forlorn attempt to stop me from mentioning his age. Which is 43. Much too old, Vann is worried, to have just published his debut work of fiction. “Don’t destroy the fragile dream,” he begs me.

He shouldn’t worry. Vann is energetic and boyish, with pallid blue eyes, slightly receding flaxen hair and an open, engaging face. He looks more like a jock than someone who writes about “the dark and isolated heart of the American soul”, as one critic put it. He bristles with athleticism and has those muscular upper arms American men seem to get off-the-shelf, tucked under a light blue sports shirt, bottomed off with khakis. He could easily get away with lying about his age, if he were that kind of person, which he is not.

More importantly, Legend of a Suicide, Vann’s first collection of stories, has won rapturous reviews, particularly on the eastern side of the Atlantic. It has drawn comparison with some great contemporary American writers — Cormac McCarthy, Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford. What’s really surprising is not that Vann came to fiction late but that he wrote the stories in his twenties and spent more than a decade vainly trying to get someone, anyone, to publish the book. He even offered one publisher $10,000 to help promote it. Being represented for a while by the American superagent Amanda “Binky” Urban — Vann has also written non-fiction, including an account of his misadventures at sea — didn’t help either.

“She’s great, and she liked the book, but she wasn’t going to send it out,” he says. “And she’s the biggest agent in the world!”

In 2007, Vann finally submitted Legend of a Suicide for the prestigious Grace Paley prize in short fiction: “Because I realised that no editor I had was ever going to read it in my lifetime, because of what it’s about: suicide.” It won. The book then found a small academic publisher and garnered some good, if not ecstatic, reviews in America. Now, as has happened with American rock bands such as the White Stripes, first appreciated in the UK, it has taken British reviewers and readers to give the remarkable book its due.

The long-stalled publication has a special resonance for Vann because the five stories in the book, in particular Sukkwan Island, the main novella, are spun around the violent tragedy in his own life, the suicide of his father. Vann was just 13 when his father, then 39, killed himself. That shattering death was, through his adolescence and much of his adult life, a black hole that he desperately struggled not to be consumed by.

His father was a dentist who fancied himself an intrepid adventurer. His life was spinning out of control. He had ruined two marriages with his infidelities and had growing financial problems. In March, 1980, he had just moved into a new house in Fairbanks, Alaska. He was on the phone to Vann’s stepmother, telling her he was not going to live without her. As she still had the phone to her ear, he shot himself with a .44 Magnum handgun, which, as Vann says, was powerful enough to down a grizzly bear at close range. “She heard the dripping sounds as pieces of his head came off the ceiling and landed on the card table,” he has since written.

Vann, who had been born in Alaska, was living with his mother in California and only saw his father during vacations. He still felt close to his father, who had taught him how to shoot, given him guns and taken him and the family on foolhardy adventures in the Alaskan wilderness and at sea. But Vann had refused when his father had asked him to spend the next school year with him in Alaska.

“I wanted to spend time with him and I missed him, but I was afraid. Alaska is still a frontier and a rough place in some ways. I was scared of him, too, scared of his despair. So I said no. Two weeks after, he goes and kills himself. The guilt was tremendous.”

Because Vann didn’t see the scattering of his father’s ashes, which he admits was a “big mistake”, he says that “for years I had these fantasies that he was coming across the tundra, struggling through the snow; that maybe he was an agent for the government and his death was a cover-up. The truth is that all of our lives were destroyed by his suicide, for a long time. I was an insomniac for 15 years”.

While the unassailable fact of his father’s suicide hovers about every sentence, what is so beguiling and powerful about Legend of a Suicide is that it is fiction. The novella, Sukkwan Island, is about a young boy who joins his father for a year on a remote island in the Alaskan wilderness. It is brimful with reminiscences, sounds and smells from Vann’s own childhood, his fractured relationship with his father and his memories of a now mythic Alaska. But it is also, as becomes shockingly clear at the story’s terrible climax, a completely fictional reimagining of Vann’s father’s death, a violent act of revenge by Vann on his father for the tragic legacy of the suicide he has had to carry with him for so many years.

For a long time, Vann lived with the abiding terror that he, too, would commit suicide: “For me, going to sea was a test, partly to find out what it had meant for him. It was also to find out what would happen when I sank as low as I possibly could. Would I kill myself? That haunted me for 20 years. But at the lowest point in my life since his death, I found out that I wasn’t interested at all in killing myself. And I haven’t felt that sense of doom ever since — 1999, December. Ten years ago.” That was when, as Vann described in his first, non-fiction, book, A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea (2005), he had to abandon his boat off Morocco when it lost its rudder. He has also been buoyed by the support of his wife, Nancy, a teacher. They have been married for eight years.

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