Brought up in Alaska and California, David Vann was given his first rifle at the age of seven and shot his first buck at the age of 11. This passion for hunting and firearms was handed down to him by his father who, when Vann was 13, blew his own head off with a .44 Magnum handgun, a weapon more often used for bringing down ­grizzly bears at close range.

Coming to terms with this appallingly violent act of self-destruction has been a long process for Vann, but those 30 years of grief, guilt, rage and confusion have now been distilled into an American classic. Consisting of a novella and five short stories, Legend of a Suicide approaches the defining event of Vann’s life from a number of different and often ­brilliantly oblique angles. Although it is evident from what Vann has written elsewhere that much of this material is based in detail upon real events, the book is far more than a lightly disguised memoir, playing instead a set of elaborate variations upon a central theme.

The first story, for example, describes how Vann’s alter ego, the young Roy Fenn, “decided to become an ichthyologist”. As a prelude to this, Roy recalls how on halibut-fishing trips with his father he was detailed to stop the day’s catch flopping out of the boat back into the ocean: “If they didn’t flop, I didn’t smash their head with a hammer.” This prefigures the grisly ends of many of the ornamental fish Roy keeps in a tank at home — and indeed, horrifyingly, his father’s own death, transposed here from land to sea.

The most startling variation occurs in the novella, Sukkwan Island, in which the 13-year-old Roy is taken homesteading by his father. His parents have separated and Roy has been living with his mother and younger sister in California. His father, Jim, takes him to live off the land on the isolated island of the title, part of the Alexander ­archipelago off the southeast coast of Alaska. Jim has also separated from his second wife and it soon becomes clear that the purpose of this trip for him is as much to escape the disasters of his own life as it is to bond with his son. Furthermore, for all his masculine ­posturing, Jim spends his nights in a welter of self-pitying tears and proves incompetent at living in the wild, several times placing himself and Roy in mortal danger. The twist that occurs halfway through this harrowing but beautifully wrought novella is so unexpected and shocking that it would be unfair to reveal it, but Vann — who has described Sukkwan Island as a “psychological revenge story” — uses it to convey in the most extraordinarily concrete way the burden a suicide places on those left behind.

One story, Rhoda, describes Roy’s ­stepmother and her own dysfunctional family, and appears largely comic. It is only later, in a casual aside, that we learn that the latent violence of Rhoda’s parents’ relationship had catastrophic results. Indeed, violence, suppressed or otherwise, runs through all these stories, not only in relation to Roy’s father but also, as a series of ­aftershocks, in Roy himself: from his apparently ­mindless shooting out of streetlights as an adolescent in suburban California in A Legend of Good Men to the wanton destruction of salmon fingerlings in Ketchikan when as an adult he returns to the Alaskan coastal town in which he was raised. While none of these stories is for the ­faint-hearted, they are leavened by flashes of dark humour and by the sheer quality of the writing.

For Roy’s dentist father, who, squinting into mouths, sees “his whole life reduced to something cramped and small”, the idea of the wild offers a means of escape. Vann writes about that landscape, the sea and the often hostile ­physical world his characters inhabit with the sort of precision that comes from lived experience and close observation, and in a prose as clear and bracing as a mountain stream. Psychologically, too, this is a compelling book that equally precisely delineates the contours and limitations of masculinity, and the sheer effort required by unanchored people attempting to find ­purchase in a world that is “held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all”.

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
Penguin £7.99 pp230

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