David Vann's novel "Dirt" is indelibly affecting

Dirt By David Vann Harper. 258 pp. $25.99

Reviewed by Kevin Grauke

If you've been looking in the right places, you've seen David Vann's name everywhere recently.

In less than four years, he has published four books. This fact alone is impressive for any writer who aims to produce anything above the level of pulp and schlock; it's so much more impressive once you realize that each of Vann's four books is excellent enough to have been the only book he published during this span of time.

First came Legend of a Suicide, a collection of stories that won the Grace Paley Prize and immediately drew the attention of serious readers across the nation and the globe. Then came his first novel, the brutal and uncompromising Caribou Island, which was followed by a chilling foray into nonfiction, last year's Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter.

Now we have Vann's second novel. Set in 1985, Dirt introduces us to Galen, a troubled 22-year-old man who lives in self-imposed isolation with his autocratic and emotionally manipulative mother, Suzie-Q. Eking out a living on the remains of a family trust fund in the Central Valley of California — which is a "long, hot trough of crass," as far as Galen is concerned — the two interact only with three other people: Suzie-Q's mother (whom she's placed in a nursing home — prematurely, it seems), her sister, Helen; and her niece, 17-year-old Jennifer.

Galen, who has been told that there is not enough money to send him to college, hates his mother but is incapable of finding the strength to strike out on his own. With no way of discovering the identity of his father and feeling suffocated by Suzie-Q, who has "made him into a kind of husband, her own son," Galen turns to books for solace, specifically the spiritual self-help provided by Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, and Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Inspired by their examples, he aspires to transcend the physical realm so that he may discover "the void beyond the universals, some region of truth." Unfortunately for Galen, however, enlightenment eludes him due to his inability to overcome "samsara," the temptations of the material world — namely, his Hustler magazine and his sexually aggressive cousin, who both taunts him with glimpses of her naked self and derides him about his virginity.

For a while, Galen's tribulations are amusing. As he bemoans being an old soul unfairly trapped within a family of clueless younger souls, we chuckle — with compassion or not — at his efforts to reimagine his sheltered, static life as one worthy of envy rather than pity and ridicule. However, soon enough, the humor to be found in the machinations of this New Age naïf amidst his maladjusted kin evaporates. While on a family trip to a cabin in the Sierras, unwholesome desires are acted upon, unpleasant secrets are discovered, and buried emotions are drawn to the surface. Revelations spawn threats and other consequences, and these consequences, to which the novel's final hundred pages are scrupulously dedicated, are ugly, to say the least.

At a crucial moment midway through the novel, Vann's narrator notes that "Galen had always looked to water, thinking his meditation would be the same as Siddhartha's, the water in which he would see all things forming and dissipating, but Galen's rightful meditation had been here all along, a meditation on dirt." Not only does this observation cause us to contemplate the significance of the novel's title, it also propels us in frightening fashion toward an ending that shames us for dismissing Galen as nothing more than a desperate man grasping at any belief system that might allow him to dismiss his miserable circumstances as insignificant in the eternal scheme of things. Soon enough, we're reminded that, sometimes, only a fine line separates a sensible disciple from an unhinged zealot.

Brave is a word that gets used too much to describe too many novelists these days. Usually, writers win the adjective merely by showing brief glimpses of vile realms, physical, emotional, or spiritual; rarely do their characters ever do more than peer curiously into the depths before recovering their senses, though perhaps not without a few lasting effects. Vann, on the other hand, truly is brave, because he is never satisfied with simply leading us by the hand a few feet down the rabbit hole; no, he stuffs us down with the butt end of a pitchfork and refuses to let us out until we've breathed in the black dirt at the very bottom. We may not enjoy the experience — in fact, we may wish he would be less brave — but there is no denying that we emerge indelibly affected.