Through a story, darkly
Julie MyersonABOVE: The Suicide of Lucretia (1538) by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Legend of a Suicide
By David Vann (Penguin, £7.99)
A friend passes me a book. It’s by a young American writer called David Vann—five short stories and a novella which burst like fireworks from one single terrible fact: the suicide of a father. A real father. His father. The stories and the novella are billed as works of fiction, but the writer’s father—we know this from the author’s acknowledgements—did in fact kill himself when the writer was a teenager.
With this in mind, I can’t help but pick the book up with a certain taste already in my mouth. Because even if the account has in some way been fictionalised—and why not?—the knowledge that it was inspired by a truth hugely colours my response to it. When it comes to suicide, we think we already know the plot, and certainly we know the ending. The father will die, the son will lose the father. So I already have a sense of what emotional shape this book, for all its claims of being a fiction, might take. I’m more than willing to go on the ride, but it’s unlikely that there will be any big surprises, right?
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