David Vann: Legend of a Modern Classic

David Vann's new book is hard to describe. Not quite a novel, but not quite a collection of short stories either, Legend of a Suicide takes a pivotal moment in one family's life – the death of the father 'by his own hand' (as they used to say) – and reworks it over six chapters/stories. Facts and points of view are slippery things, though, and the reader can often feel strangely disoriented by Vann's book.

We wanted to find out more, so asked the author some questions. He was kind enough to reply.

> At the end of Legend of a Suicide you acknowledge some pretty heavyweight writers. How intimidating was it to put your own work out there?

I don’t feel intimidated by great writers, or even really envy them, because I realise it’s not a competition. We each write what we can. I try to understand and ingest their work and hope that some aspect of it might appear in my own. No writer is truly original. We’re all using what has come before. And publishing, seeing one’s work out in the world, is a gift and immensely satisfying. 

> The University of Massachusetts Press seems an unusual publisher for the book. How did it initially come to be published by them?

The book won the Grace Paley Prize from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in the US, and UMass Press was the participating publisher. But the US paperback will come out in January from HarperPerennial. In the UK, the book is with Viking/Penguin, and I’ve had the best experience an author could possibly have, with the support of my brilliant editor, Mary Mount, and the hard work of Joe Pickering, who has been getting it out into the world. My next book out will be a novel, Caribou Island, from HarperCollins and Viking/Penguin UK, but then I’ll be returning to another academic publisher, University of Georgia Press, for a book I’ve written on the Northern Illinois University school shooting, titled Last Day On Earth, because it’s won the 2009 AWP Nonfiction Prize.

> Traditionally, the US has been the successful home of the short story, but American writers we’ve spoken to recently have indicated that this golden age could be over. Is that your experience?

Several slick magazines in the US have cut back on the short story. The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, where I was first published, used to introduce several new writers each year and run a story each month, but now they have only a summer fiction issue, which is a real shame, since C. Michael Curtis is such a great fiction editor. I hate to see his influence become more limited. Many of us owe our careers to him. I don’t think we can say the short story is waning in the US, though, because it’s the primary focus of our writing programs, and we have more than 300 of those now, I think. In our literary quarterlies, online magazines, and contests, etc, I think there’s still a lot going on, even though the general public doesn’t read short stories. The UK general public seems to me much more literary, and I think the new Sunday Times prize as well as their regular slots for stories are signs that in the UK, the short story can have an audience beyond writers and writing programs, and that’s very exciting

> Having got the reader used to the idea of the father’s suicide, the twist at the heart of the collection comes like a blow to the back of the head with a plank of wood. Can you tell us a bit more about the writing of this story?

That surprise in the middle of the book came as a surprise to me, too. I didn’t see it coming at all, until I was halfway into that sentence. And then it was inevitable, and I realised that everything I had written before was different than I had assumed. It was really about something else, and this is what I love about writing fiction. I love when the story takes over, when the patterns and meaning are subconscious. To me, that feels like participation in mystery. It feels like a gift.

> What else were you reading while writing the book?

As I wrote the first story, 'Ichthyology', I was reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, and I heard something more generous in Robinson’s voice that allowed me to write about my father’s suicide in a lighter, lovelier way. My early attempts had two much emotion on the first page. They were too upset and confused, but Robinson and Bishop provided a different voice.  For 'Rhoda', I was reading Raymond Carver and the story is minimalist. For 'A Legend of Good Men', I was studying Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and borrowed the hagiographic structure. The title of my book takes this meaning of Legend, as a series of portraits of the father’s suicide and my own bereavement. For the novella, 'Sukkwan Island', I was reading six novels by Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, trying to find character through landscape. For 'Ketchikan', I was reading Bishop’s poems again, and that story is really a landscape meditation, closer to a prose poem at least in its opening pages. The influences for 'The Higher Blue' are fabulist, especially Donald Barthelme.

> How did you structure the writing of it? Did you work on each story autonomously or write it with a bigger picture in mind?

I worked on the book for ten years, and I wrote other stories that I eventually cut from the book, because I wanted the book to be very cohesive, with one overall vision. The book only fully makes sense if the stories are read in this order, and together. They don’t mean as much on their own.

> Having written quite extensively about father and son relationships, do you have plans for where to go next?

My next book, which will come out next fall, is a novel titled Caribou Island. It returns to my native Alaska, the setting a small island in a glacier-fed lake on the Kenai Peninsula. It’s not at all about father and son relationships, though. It focuses primarily on a marriage, landscape, and murder.

> Who is your favourite author and why?

Cormac McCarthy, for his use of landscape, but also Annie Proulx and Marilynne Robinson. I think Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country is fabulous, too. That’s my favourite recent book.