Product Description

Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, puts a .44 magnum to his head and commits suicide on the deck of his beloved boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood, describing with poignant, mercurial wit his parentsÂ’ woeful marriage and inevitable divorce, their kindnesses and weaknesses, the absurd and comic turning-points of his past. Finally, in Legend of a Suicide, Roy lays his fatherÂ’s ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a gruelling, exhilarating revenge. Revolving around a fatally misconceived adventure deep in the wilderness of Alaska, this is a remarkably tender story of survival and disillusioned love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #866 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-29
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
A richly gifted newcomer (Sunday Times Books for 2009 )

Vann uses startling powers of observation to create strong characters, tense scenes and genuine surprises (Publishers’ Weekly )

Oh my god, Legend of a Suicide just bowled me over completely. It is such a tender, heartbreaking, breathtaking, horrifying and insanely compelling read that when I finished it I went straight back to the beginning and round again. I implore anyone with functioning eyes to read this book (Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine )

So hard to put down that I am thinking of suing David Vann for several hours of lost sleep (Lionel Shriver )

This book squeezes more life out of the first hundred pages than most books could manage in a thousand, which is pretty impressive, considering it's a book about death (Ross Raisin, author of God's Own Country )

In his portrayal of a young son's love for his lost father David Vann has created a stunning work of fiction: surprising, beautiful and intensely moving (Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers )

One of the most gripping debuts I've ever read (Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan )

Impossible to put down and equally impossible to forget (San Francisco Chronicle )

An extraordinary, ground-breaking piece of fiction … Nothing quite like this book has been written before (Alex Linklater, Observer )

One jaw-droppingly powerful, courageous and original fiction debut...As a 10th work of fiction this would be impressive; as a debut, it is remarkable (Sunday Telegraph )

An American classic … harrowing but beautifully wrought … prose as clear and bracing as a mountain stream (Sunday Times )

Hands down the best fictional debut we have read this year (Dazed & Confused )

For the imagery alone and for the sentences, the book would be a treasure, but the story it tells – the story of the suicide of the author's father – has an immediacy and sharpness made all the more special by the tone of distance in the narrative and the beauty of the writing (Colm Toibin, Observer books of the year )

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide is brave, fantastically well written, and completely defies categorisation (Julie Myerson, Daily Telegraph books of the year )

About the Author
David Vann was born on Adak Island, Alaska and spent his childhood in Ketchikan. A contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Men's Journal, Outside and National Geographic Adventure, he is author of the best-selling memoir A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea and a forthcoming novel, Caribou Island. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow, taught at Stanford and Cornell, and is currently a professor at the University of San Francisco. Legend of a Suicide won the 2007 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.

Customer Reviews

'A father, after all, is a lot for a thing to be.'
As the title suggests this book from David Vann isn't so much a single narrative but a collection of stories (one really a novella) inspired by a single event. The root of this comes from his own life, his father having committed suicide in 1980, an event that was presumably earth-shattering. From those shards Vann has reflected in different ways on the effects of that suicide, particularly on those people left behind in its wake. For the reader there is a slightly unsettling sensation as each story develops; the names of the principal characters remain the same but the circumstances and facts in each case seem to be slightly different - this ensures that the book remains resolutely a piece of fiction rather than a factual exhumation. This fragmented approach is incredibly effective for focusing attention on particular themes and also provides the book as a whole with a truly jaw-dropping shock, slap bang in the middle, which I wouldn't dream of revealing in this review.

Looking quickly at the stories first, Ichthyology shows the choices and decisions Roy witnesses his father make that lead toward his suicide. Whilst his father pursues various ill-advised ventures on the water Roy is living with his mother far away in California. His father's fishing boat (on which he puts the gun to his head) contrasts with the fish tank that Roy keeps at home and the final image of a fly 'mired in the water, sending off his million tiny ripples of panic' serves to highlight how far those shock waves can travel. Rhoda looks at Roy's relationship with his stepmother, a woman whose unknown quality makes her so intriguing. The eyelid of her right eye is drooped, never opening but also never quite closing, a sight which on closer inspection Roy realises 'made her terribly beautiful.' In A Legend Of Good Men whilst Roy's widowed mother goes through a series of unsuccessful relationships he develops his own relationship with that most American of accessories: the gun. It begins harmlessly enough (if such a thing is possible) but after shooting out street lights and stop signs Roy then breaks into his own house, shooting out windows and doors. Vann turning this cry for attention into something personal as Roy sits on the porch, waiting for the police to arrive, hoping that one of his mother's past suitors will be one of them.

Roy is 30 years old in Ketchikan where he returns to 'the place my dead father had first gone astray, the place where this father and his suicide and his cheating and his lies and my pity for him, also, might be put to rest.' What he actually hopes to do is meet the woman with whom his father had had an affair, 'to talk with her and maybe tell her who I was'. His life having been so shaped by this one event, or to be more accurate the stories surrounding the event, the narrative he has made for himself, what he is looking for is some kind of revenge. What though, if things are not as he has imagined.

The real act of revenge though comes in Sukkwan Island, the novella at the centre of this book. It comes in two parts; the first seen from Roy's point of view, the second his father Jim's. In an attempt at bonding Jim takes Roy with him to this remote island in Alaska where he has a house. Vann's descriptive prose is extraordinary in this section, creating the vast impenetrable wilderness that surrounds them, the harsh weather, the constant threat of danger from both the elements and wildlife with whom they share the island. Whilst the house in its dilapidated state presents the first challenge for father and son the real danger to them both is the mental state of Roy's suicidal father. Ill prepared and irresponsible, incapable of caring for himself let alone another, and exposed in this setting to the harshest possible challenges there is something primal about the atmosphere which reminded me of Cormac McCarthy amongst others and had me gripped from the first page to the last.


'Over the next two days, in the rain, they cut the poles for the roof and a smaller second roof. They sawed the lengths and stripped off the branches with a hatchet, Roy watching this father with his grim unshaven face when he worked, the cold rain dripping off the end of his nose. He seemed as solid then as a figure carved from stone, and all his thoughts as immutable, and Roy could not reconcile this father with the other, the one who wept and despaired and had nothing about him that could last. Though Roy had memory, it seemed nonetheless that whatever father he was with at the time was the only father that could be, as if each in its time could burn away the others completely.'


There is something so sad about the lack of connection between father and son, not just in this section but throughout the book. On Sukkwan Island Roy realises that this trip, designed to throw the two of them closer together, feels no different from any of their previous vacations and he wonders whether that will change. So as not to ruin anything I will say no more about a story which is as powerful as anything I have read this year, the year before that and possibly ever and hope that that is enough to pique your interest to find out why.

Best book of 2009
I read this book while on holiday, and halfway through let out a gasp so loud and shocked that my friend with whom I was sharing a hotel room came running to see what was wrong. But, in fact, much about Legend of a Suicide is very right - and should be, since it seems that Vann took a decade to write it. The time and care and thought that went in to it is evident on every page: not just a compelling, searing collection of narratives, Legend allows the reader a rare kind of insight into the author's thought process, which is a rare treat for anyone who is interested in the business of writing itself. Certainly the best new book I've read so far this year.

Gripping writing
This is a series of linked short stories,though one of them - the best - is novella length. They tell of the shadow that the suicide of Roy's monstrous father has cast over his life, in a style that brings to mind Tobias Wolff,Ernest Hemingway and, in their close observation of the sea and fishing, Elizabeth Bishop. The story of the time Roy spends with his father on a remote Alaskan island is a masterly narrative - atmospheric and gripping to the extent that I couldn't put the book down. David Vann is a writer to watch.