UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

David Vann

Set mostly in the wilds of Alaska, these stories take on the shifting legend of a lost father

Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in
Short Fiction

In “Ichthyology,” a young boy watches his father spiral from divorce to suicide. The story is told obliquely, often through the boy’s observations of his tropical fish, yet also reveals his father’s last desperate moves, including quitting dentistry for commercial fishing in the Bering Sea. “Rhoda” goes back to the beginning of the father’s second marriage and the boy’s fascination with his stepmother, who has one partially closed eye. This eye becomes a metaphor for the adult world the boy can’t yet see into, including sexuality and despair, which feel like the key initiating elements of the father’s eventual suicide. “A Legend of Good Men” tells the story of the boy’s life with his mother after his father’s death through the series of men she dates.

In “Sukkwan Island,” an extraordinary novella, the father invites the boy homesteading for a year on a remote island in the southeastern Alaskan wilderness. As the situation spins out of control, the son witnesses his father’s despair and takes matters into his own hands. In “Ketchikan,” the boy is now thirty years old, searching for the origin of ruin. He tracks down Gloria, the woman his father first cheated with, and is left with the sense of “a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all.” Set in Fairbanks, where the author’s father actually killed himself, “The Higher Blue” provides an epilogue to the collection.

"This well-crafted debut collection, five stories and a novella, from award-winning writer and memoirist Vann (A Mile Down) revolves obsessively around the suicide of an Alaskan father. Hopscotching through time, each tale examines the father's death from the perspective of his young son, Roy. The first story, 'Ichthyology,' introduces the young protagonist and his troubled father, a tax-dodging dentist and fisherman who ends up shooting himself on the deck of his fishing boat. 'Rhoda' finds the 12-year-old boy bonding with his new stepmother, a pretty young woman his father married before the tragedy. In 'A Legend of Good Men,' Roy imagines a fantastically violent rampage in which he does away with his mother's suitors, á la Odysseus and Telemachus. The novella, 'Sukkwan Island,' is an increasingly suspenseful story of survival, in which a 13-year old Roy and his father brace the elements for months in an isolated mountain cabin. Vann uses startling powers of observation to create strong characters, tense scenes and genuine surprises, leading to a ghastly conclusion that's sure to linger."

Publishers Weekly

"This is one of the most striking fictional debuts in recent memory, and David Vann is an important new voice in American literature."

Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“As the title suggests, the stories in Legend of a Suicide approach a private mythos, revisiting, reinvestigating, and reinventing one family’s broken past. They also transport us to wild, uncharted places on the Alaskan coast and in the American soul. Throughout, David Vann is a generous, sure-handed guide in some very dangerous territory.”

Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster
and Snow Angels: A Novel

“The characters in these stories are extreme in their isolation from one another, whether they come together in a howling wind or in the comforts of a warm kitchen. Here is suicide, infidelity, madness; here are people whose skewed optimism about the next love affair, the next career, the next homestead, proves deadly. . . . Memory, affection for place, the mangled ways we manage to express the love we feel—David Vann is unafraid of the weight and the complication of these things. He is emboldened in these stories to fall headlong into the disorienting wilderness of the human heart and mind.”
Noy Holland, contest judge and author of What Begins with Bird

David Vann is assistant professor of English at Florida State University. A contributor to Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Men’s Journal, and Outside, he is author of a best-selling memoir, A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea, and recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and Wallace Stegner Fellowship.

Fiction / Alaska
160 pp.
$24.95 cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-672-9
November 2008

Please visit the author's website at www.davidvann.com.

Published in association with the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP)

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