Guest Review: Chris Womersley on L153 David Vann

Writer-in-Residence, Chris Womersley reviews American author, David Vann's appearance at this year's Literature Festival discussing his debut novel, Legend of a Suicide his latest novel, Caribou Island and how themes of darkness affect the reading public.

What is it about darkness that so frightens the reading public? On Monday night David Vann, the author of Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island, was in discussion with Steven Gale in Imperial Square. Vann’s father committed suicide when David was a 13-year-old boy and his novel Legend of a Suicide is a fictionalised account of the emotional fallout from that traumatic event. He found it almost impossible to get the novel published – tried unsuccessfully, in fact, for 12 years but was repeatedly turned down because of the grim nature of the novel’s subject.

Legend of a Suicide was eventually only published in 2008 because it won a prize, one of the conditions of which was publication. Most of the reviews in the US, he said, praised the quality of the writing but advised the public to steer clear of it because of its subject matter. The New York Times, however, supported Vann and the novel has gone on to win a number of prizes and be translated into several languages. ‘I sell more of Legend of a Suicide in Catalan than I do in English in the US,’ he said, laughing. ‘The French love it, too.’

The novel’s themes – of death, of the lingering impacts violence – are perhaps somewhat un-American, which might explain the novel’s muted US reception and sales. The American dream, according to Vann, is not about money, per se, but about the willingness to reinvent oneself – for the better, naturally. Wilderness in both Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island is also a place where characters find not their essential goodness and humanity, but their darkness. Again, it’s a particularly un-American notion (although a common current in Australian literature), whose pioneer history is one of families and individuals striking out into the wilderness and finding their more essential – and better - natures.

One might wonder what a publisher might make of Anna Karenina were it to fall across their desk in this day and age. Yes, it’s well written and a convincing portrayal of a woman’s interior life but does she really have to, you know, kill herself at the end?

Chris Wormersley
Writer-in-Residence