Recent Reviews
Halibut on the Moon by David Vann
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner
on April 14, 2019
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/halibut-on-the-moon-evocatively-details-one-mans-descent/
Some books are read for insight and some for the enjoyment of a good story. Award winning author David Vann’s new novel falls in the former category. ‘Halibut on the Moon’ is a difficult story to read yet provides insight and empathy for a man who suffers from mental illness and dreams of suicide. Vann’s fictionalized account of his father’s life is raw and heartbreaking.
When the novel begins, Jim Vann, a 39 year-old dentist, is descending both literally and figuratively. He is landing in San Francisco, California on a flight from Fairbanks, Alaska. His younger brother Gary picks him up at SFO and they drive to Gary’s home in Sebastopol. Knowing of his brother’s depression, Gary has arranged for Jim to see a psychiatrist who prescribes an unnamed medicine and instructs Gary not to leave Jim alone.
The novel follows Gary and Jim as they visit their parents, Jim’s kids and his oldest friend. Part of the novel’s tension derives from how the characters fail to connect with each another. Jim believes that he has come to review the course of his life, and say goodbye before he commits suicide. While Gary believes that Jim has returned to get help and feel the love and support of family. But Jim’s family lacks the ability to understand and address Jim’s illness.
On the surface, Jim’s problems are apparent. He has two ex-wives, two confused children and a $365,000 debt to the IRS. But Jim seems less bothered by these facts than by the intense irrational thoughts that haunt his inner life. He lives in a dark tunnel that light and love rarely reach.
How he arrived in this downward spiral of mental illness is not known; no doubt a storm of factors starting with lousy luck in the genetic lottery. His parents are another unfortunate piece of the puzzle. They are remote, distant and simple. When Gary and Jim arrive at their childhood home on the shores of Clear Lake, Jim’s hostility is apparent. He says to his mother “You look old now, and you’re bigger, and you have that loose neck.” To his father, “Have you been fat that long?” No one engages as they eat lunch. His mother says grace, “Please help my boy Jim. Help guide him and comfort him and make your love clear. Help get us all through this difficult time.” Jim blurts back, “Where do I get this feeling that I’m a piece of shit?”
These family members cannot connect. Jim’s parents believe that his troubles derive from moral shortcomings not a mental illness. When Jim starts a manic rant, Gary exclaims, “All you have to do is stop.” Jim wishes he could stop, but it is not that easy. He says early in the novel, “Why does anyone think they can control what they feel?”
Carrying his gun, thinking about sex and considering suicide all comfort Jim’s troubled mind. He tells Gary of a NASA experiment when astronauts took a halibut to the moon. “They didn’t mean for it to survive. It was supposed to have one beautiful flight, is all. That’s all any of us are meant to have. None of us survive.”
David Vann’s artistic rendering of his father’s struggle must have helped to repair his own heart. The book’s dialogue captures the wild gyrations of Jim’s mind. Vann reveals the unrestrained euphoria and crushing depression that define Jim’s exhausting existence. It is generous of Vann to share this poignant and powerful story. His evocative writing helps us understand the erratic and illogical thinking that can come with mental illness. We become witnesses to a man stuck in a tunnel of pain while his helpless family cannot reach him. You many not “enjoy” ‘Halibut on the Moon’, but you will likely read it to the end and emerge from the experience with greater empathy for those among us who cannot control the machinations of their mind.
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
Whenever I am about to embark on a trip, I thoroughly enjoy searching for stories set in the city of my destination. Earlier this month, my husband and I traveled to Lisbon, Portugal. In our luggage, we packed Lisbon books that we relished reading in the city’s cafés.
My favorite novel was Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon written in 2004. The book follows the midlife journey of Raimund Gregorius a 57-year-old divorced classics professor living in Bern, Switzerland. After years in the same routine, he is open to change. He knows his life is half over and feels envy toward his students, “How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience.”
While walking to his school one morning in the pouring rain, he notices a woman leaning over the edge of a bridge reading a letter. It appears that she might jump, but doesn’t. They speak briefly and Gregorius learns one fact about her: she is Portuguese. The encounter shakes him. Rather than teach his class, he walks to a nearby hotel and has a cup of tea. He has taken the first step to change his life.
Then at his local bookstore, Gregorius coincidently discovers a book by a Portuguese man named Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado. The book is titled A Goldsmith of Words. The introduction strikes a chord with Gregorius. Prado writes of wanting to become the ‘archeologist of his soul’ to understand the choices of his life. “Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us –what happens with the rest?” These two Portuguese connected events inspire him. Within a couple of days, he makes an uncharacteristic decision and boards a train to Lisbon. He hopes to learn more about Amadeu Prado.
The novel follows Gregorius as he wanders through the streets of Lisbon learning about the complex life of Amadeus Prado and the book Prado wrote thirty years ago. When Prado and his friends were young, they had been part of the resistance against the right wing dictator António Salazar who ruled Portugal for 36 years. Like a John Le Carré or Dan Brown novel, the story follows Gregorius as he slowly pieces together what happened to Prado and his fellow fighters leading up to the Portuguese revolution of 1974. The book is not about the politics of Portugal. Rather the novel focuses on the now middle age resistance members who Gregorius meets. They each look back at the group’s complicated dynamics and the life and death choices they made during that terrifying time. Gregorius has empathy for each person’s plight and feels invigorated as he grasps each person’s perspective. The novel contains Prado’s plaintive philosophical and psychological musings about parents, love, religion and the meaning of life.
This novel was engaging, enjoyable and stimulating. Even if you are not in Lisbon, Night Train to Lisbon is a wonderful ride.
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Just like our country, the house that stands at the center of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel Unsheltered, feels like it is on the verge of collapse. Though Kingsolver does not mention any specific names, her novel explores the deleterious effects of shortsighted social policies and the belief that scientific facts are malleable and partisan. Her novel is complex, rich and frightening, yet leaves her readers with shreds of hope.
Unsheltered is the tale of two families living 150 years apart in the same spot: the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey. Willa Knox, her husband, two kids and her xenophobic, dying father-in-law have played by the rules and are struggling in the midst of the 2016 presidential election. Willa is a journalist whose magazine has folded. Her husband is a college professor whose college has gone bankrupt. Her son has $100,000 of debt from Harvard Business School and her daughter has just returned from Cuba extolling the virtues of a socialist system that provides shelter, health care and education for its people. Meanwhile, Willa relentlessly navigates our convoluted health care system to ease her conservative father-in-law Nick’s pain. Nick embraces candidate Trump “because rich white guys are supposed to be running the world.” He doesn’t understand “how black and brown people get to have nice stuff, be in charge of things? Or women, God forbid. When Nick didn’t get his turn yet?” Desperate for a way out of their financial crisis, Willa researches their eligibility for grants under a historic home preservation program.
In 1861, Charles Landis was a famous real estate mogul who bought 20,000 acres for $500 in Vineland, New Jersey. Seeking to create his version of a utopian community, Landis required all residents to abide by his rules. Kingsolver notes the parallels between the life of our current leader and Charles Landis. (Landis did, in fact, shoot someone and suffered no consequences!)
During the 1870s, Thatcher Greenwood, a Vineland science teacher, his wife, two daughters and mother-in-law lived in the house at 6th and Plum. They, too, lacked the resources to maintain their house. The dominant political issue of their time is the controversial teachings of Charles Darwin. Greenwood understands science and is in awe of Darwin’s discoveries. He befriends his neighbor, scientist and historical figure Mary Treat who corresponds with Darwin and other scientists of that time. Landis disdains Darwin and believes that God directs the lives of human beings.Fearing the wrath of Landis and the Vineland community, Greenwood simply teaches his students the concept of evolution without mentioning Darwin. Community outrage is imminent.
Both families live during times when corrosive and divisive rhetoric permeate their communities. In the 1870s, Darwin deniers were vociferous and vicious. In our time climate change deniers are similar. Darwin’s theories were proven to be accurate. The facts of climate change have been scientifically verified. Yet, many of our current political leaders will not accept this paradigm shift. Kingsolver offers reasons why people embrace a president whose vision is narrow and self-serving. “When men fear is the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”
Kingsolver’s novel is ambitious, probably too ambitious. Only a writer of her skill could juggle so many topics, themes and characters. Yet, the characters (especially Willa Knox and her family) feel didactic and one-dimensional. Each character’s role is to illuminate one failing component of our current social policy.
Though the book is a denunciation of our political discourse and draconian public policies, it is also a humane account of hardworking people who adhere to the rules and are still failed by their government. Though these are difficult times, Unsheltered reminds us that America has endured uninformed self-serving leadership before and, with some luck, we will again.
