David Vann was 13 when his father committed suicide. A dentist who had moved to Alaska in search of hunting and fishing, James Vann’s infidelities and ill-conceived outdoorsman adventures had ruined two marriages and left him in emotional and financial knots. His escape was a .44 handgun.

Vann has spent the past 30 years attempting to understand his father: these five stories, written in his twenties and only now published, to growing critical acclaim, are part of that process. The same two characters — a father, Jim, and a son, Roy — run through the book, but the strange and gripping tales alight on different locations, times, even different realities; spiralling outwards, in spidery fictional lines, from the death at their centre.

In the opening story, Ichthyology, the shot comes “on the bright silver stern” of Jim’s boat, his boots “slathered with the dark blood of freshly caught salmon”, while Roy, far away in California, is watching his aquarium-bound archer fish hunt. In A Legend of Good Men the suicide leaves the son on a destructive search for a replacement father. In the brilliant, episodic central novella, Sukkawan Island, a troubled Jim takes his reluctant son deep into the Alaskan wilderness for a year of survivalist living. The experiment seems doomed from the start, but that doesn’t prepare you for the traumatic twist at the story’s centre.

Fish shoal through Legend of a Suicide. At times they are beautiful, quicksilver messengers from the cold sea, but at others they are bug-eyed, vicious; dragged, gasping, from a formless world. This instability permeates the book: Jim is at one moment wailing in self-pity, and the next making pancakes and singing King of the Road, while the Alaskan landscape, echoing the internal lives of its inhabitants, quickly shifts from majesty to treachery. Vann’s prose follows the sinews of Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, yet has its own nimble flex. That this book represents a personal obsession as well as an artistic success is clear. Apparently Vann is now working on a novel. Set in Alaska, it centres on a suicide.

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
Penguin, £7.99; 240pp Buy the book

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