12 Jun 2012 09:40:53
I don't know quite when I first got a whiff of real, vicious discomfort in David Vann's new novel. Was it just a few pages in, when Galen, its apparently normal 22-year-old protagonist, getting into his mother's car to visit his grandmother, decides – for no apparent reason – to attempt the manoeuvre without the use of his arms and falls flat on the gravel? Or was it some pages later when, eating dinner with his relatives, he crams an entire plateful of hot dogs into his mouth before heading upstairs to spew them into the lavatory, acknowledging to himself that he would also have dipped his head in there for a drink "if his mother had been watching"?
Certainly, it was long before the moment when, having been discovered having sex with his 17-year-old cousin, Galen realises his mother's plan to shop him to the police for statutory rape is for real. If he is to escape a life sentence, it is time for desperate action.
People often say of thrilling books that they read them in a single sitting; with this extraordinarily alarming and convincing piece of work, I had no choice. I would actually have preferred to eke it out but, whizzing through it in the small hours, there seemed to be no point where it felt safe to break off and turn out the light. Better – surely? – to know the worst than to keep on worrying and wondering?
And Vann's novel does get worse. Possibly his biggest achievement is never to allow you to guess quite how far it – or he – will go. No author is better at making you lose your literary balance and a large part of his brilliance is that he knows how to adjust the level of derangement to just short of most disturbing. And yet, though I believed every word, I'm still not certain I really understand this novel. Conviction without comprehension – a queasy but compelling mix. The last time I had this feeling was while reading Vann's hellish 2009 debut Legend of a Suicide.
At first sight, Dirt is a fairly straightforward family money saga. Galen lives with his mother in an isolated corner of Central Valley, California. His grandmother – in the early stages of dementia – is in a rest home and his aunt and cousin are coming to visit. For some reason never entirely explained, Galen's mother seems to have control of the not inconsiderable family fortune and is hoarding the money rather than allowing either Galen or his cousin, Jennifer, the opportunity to go to college.
The tensions – inevitable bickering between the two sisters and a less inevitable but shockingly precocious seduction of Galen by his underage cousin – are chillingly realised. But it's Galen himself – a superbly uneasy and memorable creation – who rocks this novel from start to finish.
Intelligent, imaginative, unruly, possibly unhinged and borderline repellent, Galen's responses to his world are intense. He runs around with hardly any clothes on, rolls in the dirt outside and, arguably worst of all, spouts Kahlil Gibran and Carlos Castaneda. It's hard to know whether to applaud or recoil from his intuitive lack of inhibition, his thirst for self-mortification. But when we learn that he has recently been banned from a new-age bookshop for insisting on "aligning his aura with a young woman who worked there", alarm bells start to ring.
And yet the brilliance of Galen is that so many of his ideas and actions, at least in the first half of this novel, make a certain kind of comic sense: when he eats a meal with his bare hands because "he didn't want to distance himself with a fork"; when he observes his family as "two-dimensional, flattened"; and feels that "the bulb and its harsh light made it seem that if you removed his grandmother, you'd have to cut her from the fabric of the world and there'd be a hole left". Here, you feel, is a young person's psychological and emotional anomie conveyed in all its solipsistic splendour. And then, just when you've allowed yourself to relax and enjoy it a little, the novel coils up tight… and pounces.
Vann's gift – his quest, almost – is a willingness to explore the unimaginable, the unthinkable, on the page. He is the real thing – a mature, risk-taking and fantastically adept fiction writer who dares go to the darkest places, explore their most appalling corners. I haven't read a novel as rough and shocking or, importantly, as wise and warm as this one in a long time. It's not safe and it doesn't seek our approval – and I've certainly no idea what Vann wants us to think or feel about it. But isn't that a plausible definition of truly great writing: a piece of work that leaves our heads and hearts in flux – rolling, churning and, if we're lucky, changing?
