Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, puts a .44 magnum to his head and commits suicide on the deck of his beloved boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood, describing with poignant, mercurial wit his parents' woeful marriage and inevitable divorce, their kindnesses and weaknesses, the absurd and comic turning-points of his past. Finally, in Legend of a Suicide, Roy lays his father's ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a gruelling, exhilarating revenge.

Revolving around a fatally misconceived adventure deep in the wilderness of Alaska, this is a remarkably tender story of survival and disillusioned love.

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'Oh my God Legend of a Suicide just bowled me over completely. It is such a tender, heartbreaking, breathtaking, horrifying and insanely compelling read that when I finished it I went straight back to the beginning and round again.'
Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine

‘This is my ‘One to watch’, a literary debut set in Alaska about the effects of a father’s suicide on his son. It’s stunning, beautifully written, with genuine surprises and a complexity which makes you retrace your steps, wonder what really happened and ponder over the whole scenario for days. I loved it. It’s Richard Yates, Annie Proulx territory, and highly recommended.’
Sarah Broadhurst, Bookseller magazine,

‘The most powerful piece of writing I have read for a very long time.  This book squeezes more life out of the first 100 pages than most books could manage in 1000.’
Ross Raisin, author of God’s Own Country, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2009

‘I can’t remember … when a book last demolished so many of my expectations about what shape a narrative might take and about how much truth can, or should, be told by altering, rather than sticking to, the facts. Most of all, though, I am just shocked. For a while my encounter with this little book challenges everything I thought I knew about the limits of what fiction can do’
Julie Myerson,Prospect

‘Headlong narrative pacing, a memorable train-wreck father who gives Richard Russo's characters a run for their money, and a sure, sharp, inviting voice. So hard to put down that I am thinking of suing David Vann for several hours of lost sleep’
Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk about Kevin

'In his portrayal of a young son's love for his lost father David Vann has created a stunning work of fiction: surprising, beautiful and intensely moving'
Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers

‘From the shores of Vann’s Alaska one can see the Russia of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons… “A father, after all,” Vann writes, “is a lot for a thing to be.” A son is also a lot for a thing to be; so is an artist. With Legend of a Suicide David Vann proves himself a fine example of both’
New York Times

‘An extraordinary piece of work. David Vann’s dark and strange book twists through natural forces and compressed emotions towards an extraordinary and dreamlike conclusion. One of the most gripping debuts I’ve ever read’
Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan, winner of the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize

‘It is in that terse, yet heavily freighted American style of Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Cormac McCarthy where small incidents and details ring with a far more resonant significance than they first appear to have … The result is a richly dense, emotionally complex set of stories, superbly written’
David Mills, Esquire

‘Beautifully written’
Michael Arditti, Daily Mail

‘A sad and heartbreakingly wise story’
Eithne Farry, Marie Claire

‘Heart-rending’
Harper’s Bazaar

‘Extraordinary … Reminiscent of Tobias Wolff, Vann’s prose is as pure as a gulp of water from an Alaskan stream’
Financial Times

‘Perfectly crafted, heartbreaking’
Grazia

Ichthyology

My mother gave birth on Adak Island, a small hunk of rock and snow far out on the Aleutian chain, at the edge of the Bering Sea. My father was serving two years as a dentist in the Navy; he had wanted Alaska because he liked hunting and fishing, but he obviously had not known about Adak at the time of his request. Had my  mother known, she would have scratched out the request herself. Given enough information, my mother has never made the wrong choice.

So it was that she refused to have her sweltering, jaundiced baby yanked out of Adak’s underground naval hospital and thrown into the jet that sat waiting on the runway for more than six hours. Because my temperature was 105 degrees and still climbing, the doctors and my father recommended I be flown to the mainland, to a real hospital (no one on Adak survived even a mild heart attack while we were there— no one), but my mother refused. She was certain, with what my father always described as an animal, instinctive fear, that the moment I was borne aloft, I would perish. She placed me in an ordinary white bathtub filled with cold water, and there I survived. Flourished, even. My orange, blotchy skin gradually calmed to a healthy baby pink, my limbs unlocked, and I flailed my legs in the waters until she lifted me out and we both slept.

When my father had finished his sentence with the Navy, we moved to Ketchikan, an island in southeastern Alaska, where he bought a dental practice and, three years later, a fishing boat. The boat was a new twenty-three-foot Uniflite fiberglass cabin cruiser. Still wearing his dental smock beneath his jacket, he launched the boat late on a Friday afternoon as we cheered from shore. He slipped it into its stall in the docks, and the next morning he stood on the edge of those docks looking down thirty feet through clear, icy Alaskan water to where the Snow Goose sat like a white mirage on the rounded gray stones. My father had named it the Snow Goose because he had been filled with dreams of its white hull flying over the waves, but he had forgotten to put in the drain plugs the afternoon of the launching. Unlike my mother, he had neither eyes nor ears for matters below the surface.

That summer, as we flew back over the waves from a day of fishing (my father had had the Snow Goose raised and cleaned, proof that persistence sometimes can make up for a lack of vision), I would be on the open but high-sided back deck with the day’s catch of halibut, flopping into the air with them each time my father sailed over one wave and smashed into the next. The halibut themselves lay flat, like gray-green dogs on the white deck of the boat, their large brown eyes looking up at me hopefully until I whacked them with a hammer. My job was to keep them from flopping out of the boat. They had terrific strength in those wide, flat bodies, and with a good splat of their tails they could send themselves two or three feet into the air, their white undersides flashing. Between us a kind of understanding developed: if they didn’t flop, I didn’t smash their heads with the hammer. But sometimes, when the ride was especially wild and we were all thrown again and again into the air and their blood and slime were all over me, I gave out a few extra whacks, an inclination of which I am ashamed. And the other halibut, with their round brown eyes and long, judicious mouths, did see.

When we docked after those trips, my mother would check everything over, drain plugs included, while my father stood by. I played on my knees on the weathered boards of the dock, and once saw a terrifying creature crawl from a rusty tin can that had been knocked on its side. Repulsed by those barbarous legs, I howled and went over backward into the water. I was fished out soon enough, and thrown in a hot shower, but I didn’t forget what I had seen. No one had told me about lizards—I honestly never had dreamed of reptiles—but on first sight I knew they were a step in the wrong direction.

Shortly after this, when I was nearing five years old, my father began to believe that he, too, had made steps in the wrong direction, and he set out in search of the kinds of experiences he felt he had been denied. My mother was only the second woman he had ever dated, but to this list he now added the dental hygienist who worked for him. The nights at our house were soon filled with a general keening of previously unimaginable variation and endurance.

I abandoned ship one night when my father was crying alone in the living room and my mother was breaking things in their bedroom. She didn’t utter any human sounds, but I could chart her progress around their room by imagining the sources of wood snapping, glass shattering, and plaster crumbling. I slipped out into the soft, watery world of Alaskan rain-forest night, soundless except for the rain, and wandered in my pajamas down the other side of the street, peering in dark, low living room windows and listening at doors, until at one door I heard a humming sound that was unfamiliar to me.

I went around to the side of the house, opened the screen door, and pressed my ear to cold wood. The sound seemed lower now, almost a moan, barely audible.
The door was locked, but I lifted up the rubber corner of the welcome mat and, just as at our house, the key was there. So I went in.

I discovered that the buzzing sound was the air-pump filter on a fish tank. Something about wandering alone through someone else’s house was awful, and I moved solemnly across the linoleum to take a seat high on a kitchen stool. I watched the orange-and-black-striped fish suck at pebbles and spit them out. The tank contained larger rocks, also: lava rocks with dark caves and crannies out of which peered many tiny round fish eyes, shiny as foil. Some had bright red-and-blue bodies, others had bright orange bodies.

I thought perhaps the fish were hungry. I went to the refrigerator and saw sweet pickles, opened the jar, and brought it back for the fish to see. I found slots on top of the tank, toward the back, and dropped the pickles in, one or two at first, then the whole jar, slice by slice, and finally poured the juice in, too, so that the tank water swelled up and ran in beads over the side.

I stared at the pickle slices floating brightly with the fish, some of them sinking and twirling. They bounced slowly over the bright pink and blue rocks below. The orange-striped fish had all flashed about the tank as I had been pouring, but they, too, now moved slowly. They leaned a little to one side as they swam, and several rested on the rocks. Others stretched their long, see-through cartilage mouths at the surface every few moments and sucked for air. Their side fins rippled as delicately as fine lace.

When the pickle slices had settled more, they rocked like sleeping fish just above the pink and blue gravel, and the real fish rocked silently beside them, as if in gentle groves of eelgrass and sunken lily pads. The image was beautiful, and in that moment of beauty I strained forward. I pressed my hands and face close to the glass and gazed into the mute black core of one of those silvery eyes. I felt as if I, too, were floating, gently rocking, oddly out of place, and in that flicker of a moment I caught myself feeling the rocking and, perceiving myself perceiving, realized that I was I. This distracted me; then I forgot what had distracted me, lost interest in the fish, and, after slapping my feet across the linoleum of the kitchen floor, passed again into the soft, dark rain.

The subject matter is extremely personal and you’ve said you’ve been working on the book for ten years.   Did you feel a responsibility to tell the truth, or honour your memories in a particular way, given that you were fictionalising them?
The stories reflect on my father’s suicide, but they’re fictional.  The novella is entirely made up, for instance.  I never went homesteading with my father.  But I took a course with Grace Paley, and she always said that every line in a story should be true, meaning true to who the characters are, true to the meaning and significance of what’s happening in these people’s lives.  Fiction in this sense is truer to a person’s life than what actually happened, because it distils and reveals, cutting through all the dross of everyday life.  So I consider this book to be as true an account as I can write of my father’s suicide and my own bereavement, and that truth is constructed almost entirely of fictions.  As for honouring memories, I think writing is all that any writer should honour.  I think memory, family, and everything else has to be sacrificed or else it will limit the work.

Has it helped you work through some of the personal elements of the book?
I don’t view writing as therapy.  It does have therapeutic value, of course, and writing the book did help me to understand my father better and work through feelings about his death, but that wasn’t the focus or the real value.   I was trying to write something beautiful.

The stories in Legend of a Suicide are not only linked by characters and subject matter, but show a clear progression and development, thematically and stylistically.  Was this always the intention from the start or was it something that came out of the writing process?
You’re right that the stories are meant to be read together and in this order.  That’s the only way they fully make sense.  They argue with each other, and this was something I wanted after studying Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  A Legend of Good Men, one of the stories, takes its title from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women.  The arguments in Legend of a Suicide are about who my father was and the meaning of his death and its aftermath, but they’re also about different ways of telling a story, different voices and styles, and each opens up the material in a different way.  The final story is a retelling of the first story, for instance, with the same material and dramatic arc, but written as a fabulist riff instead of as a realistic short story. Ketchikan is a landscape meditation and tries to find the origins of ruin after the other attempts have fallen short.  Rhoda is a minimalist story because minimalism works well for exploring sexuality and violence, and sexuality has a place in the origins of ruin.

It’s always hard to say how much of the writing process was intentional and how much was unconscious.  The major turning point halfway through the novella came as a shock to me, for instance.  I didn’t see it coming at all until that sentence, and this is what I love most about writing.  But I did have a sense early on of wanting to write stories that would be in conversation with each other.

How would you categorise it?   As a novel, a collection of stories, or even as a kind of memoir?   Perhaps a better way of asking that question would be ‘How would you like readers to view it: as memoir, stories, or as a novel of sorts?’
It’s definitely not memoir.  Most fiction has some basis in real life.  But it’s more difficult to say whether it should be considered stories or a novel, because it’s really not either.  It has too many gaps for a novel, but the overall arc and novella make it feel like something other than a collection.  I like to think of it as a Legend, which has several meanings.   In the hagiographic tradition, a Legend or Legendary is a collection of portraits, and that’s what this is, a collection of portraits of my father and, by inevitable extension, myself.

Your preoccupation with nature and the wilderness is reminiscent of Hemingway.   Are you an admirer of his work?  Can you tell us about any other particular influences on the book? 
I am an admirer of Hemingway.  Most of my influences are landscape writers and stylists—Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Cormac McCarthy—who amplify sentences to get at the beautiful, but their amplification is an increase in organization and structure, extending through relative clauses, similes, adjectives following their nouns, etc., whereas Hemingway amplifies through dissolution.  Borrowing from Stein, he watches sentences fall apart.  Conjunctions are the simplest way of joining, and even these lose their syntactic function after a while in Hemingway.  What’s left is repetition, word collocation left patterned in a place where syntax has fallen away.

Judging from this book, and your previous account of a sailing trip, A Mile Down, you seem drawn to certain extremes and dangers; is this fair?   Why do you think this is?
Honestly, I think I’ve just been desperate.  I went to sea because I couldn’t get a professorship and needed a job, and I tried my non-stop solo circumnavigation to try to move to a bigger publisher.  That’s the sad truth.  I love the sea and boats, too, but would I really have taken all those risks without something else driving me?  I have a good professorship now, and I’ve moved to a bigger publisher without having to do that circumnav, but in the past, I’ve certainly been willing to sacrifice life and limb for the writing career.  I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  I’ve never really wanted anything else.

Do you still sail a lot, given that you’ve had so many near-death experiences?
I do.  I love sailing, and also designing and building boats.  But I’m not running a charter business anymore, not having to do passages on deadlines without regard for weather, etc.  Now I can just sail when the conditions are right.  I’ll be sailing in the Mediterranean for almost two months this summer, staying in port whenever the weather’s bad, and that sounds better, doesn’t it?  My wife deserves something better.  She’s suffered enough at sea.

Can you tell us a bit more aboutAlaska?   How do you feel that most of the world now views it through a Sarah Palin-shaped prism?
Sarah Palin is about right-wing nuts in the US, not aboutAlaska.   Palin had stronger ties with the American rural South than she had with many Alaskans.  But Alaska has a small population greatly skewed by the military, especially in Anchorage, and the military in theUS is largely uneducated, religious, and right-wing.  Like the NIU school shooter I profiled for Esquire, anyone who has served in theUS military has been trained to kill people without any psychological or emotional response.  They’re also poor, have a high incidence of mental illness, have had independent thought systematically beaten out of them, and are delusional that they are somehow protecting the freedoms the rest of us enjoy.  The truth is thatIraq and other conquests haven’t protected our freedoms at all.  The military has endangered us.  But try to argue that to someone currently in the military.  Palin was a frightening and perfect representative for these people, a nasty trick by the Republican party.  They presented something that looked progressive but wasn’t. 

Do you think growing up inAlaska, which has a certain ‘edge of the world’ quality, has given you a certain perspective on things?
My childhood inKetchikan has remained mythic in my memory because of the rainforest and ocean.  Wolves, bears, moose, giant halibut and king crab and salmon—we had all of it.  SoAlaska still has a strong pull on my writing, and a pull on what I’m drawn to in landscape and home.  And I think that spending entire days alone wandering through wilderness does perhaps instil a different sense of the importance of freedom.  Suburbia has always looked like a trap to me, for instance, and a life spent serving a job that serves others seems like a trap.  So perhaps that’s partly the influence ofAlaska.

What was it like growing up with guns as an everyday part of life?
I’ve written quite a bit about this in a piece for Men’s Journal which is coming out in their June 2009 issue.  I’ve also written online for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

You’ve spent a lot of time alone on boats and in the wild: do you enjoy or seek out solitude?
I like to spend the first part of every day alone, writing and reading, but the truth is that I don’t like to be alone in the evenings.  Even one day without my wife and I really miss her.  When I was single, I used to panic soon after sunset if I didn’t have plans to see people.  Somehow, the idea of filling all of those hours until bedtime just seemed impossible.  But wilderness and being alone at sea both appeal to me for some reason.  I feel at home out of sight of land or high in the mountains with no sign of other people.  Just a contradiction, I suppose.

The book has a filmic quality.   Can you tell us what film makers you enjoy?
In graduate school, I studied a lot of Italian film makers—Fellini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, the De Sica brothers, etc.—but I don’t think I actually have been able to use anything from them.  I’ve loved a lot of Woody Allen films, too, and the Coen brothers, but I don’t think I’ve been able to use those in a particular way, either.   I do try to write everything in scene, though, and my sense of structure is influenced by film.  Harold and Maude was the first movie I studied scene by scene, writing a one-line summary each time they cut in time or place.  By the end, I had four pages which outlined the movie, and I was amazed at how symmetrical and carefully shaped it was.

You’re reading Beowulf in the original Old English.   How is that going and what are you gaining from it?   
I love Old English, the sound of it and the syntax, the odd arrangement of meaning in a sentence.  It shows a different kind of thinking, a different relation to story and audience.  I think it’s important to know how authorship, language, and stories have changed over time, not only because that makes us better readers but also because we can still reach back in ways that have impact.  I’ve memorized the opening lines, too, and I’m trying to add a few new lines each day, because we hear and own a work differently when we memorize.  The internal shape of it starts to become visible.  It wasn’t until I’d memorized Elizabeth Bishop’s “At The Fishhouses” and Robert Pinsky’s “At Pleasure Bay,” for instance, that I could see how heavily he’d borrowed from her poem, all the turning points, the progression and vision.

I also like works in Old English other than Beowulf.  “The Seafarer,” for instance, has this great desire to return to sea despite the suffering.

If you could have written one book you haven’t, what would it be and why?
Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian, because the voice is over the top but he gets away with it.  I love the way he extends literal landscapes into figurative landscapes, and this was a big influence for my novella within Legend of a Suicide.

Finally, what other writing projects are you working on?
I’m working on a novel, Caribou Island, which will also come out from VikingUK.  It’s set in Alaska, on Skilak Lake on the Kenai Peninsula, and continues Legend of a Suicide in several ways, by focusing on Alaskan landscape and similar family issues.  It has two true family stories at its core: the murder/suicide of my stepmother’s parents (her mother killed her father with a shotgun and then killed herself with a pistol) and my grandmother’s discovery, at age 10, of her own mother hanging from the rafters in their house inBritish Columbia .  These events from Canada and California have been transposed toAlaska, and the book is also a lighter read, at least at first, because of a wider cast of characters, including a pot-farming Alaskan fisherman and his odd Scandinavian rituals.