A Mile Down: David Vann’s memoir of a disastrous career at sea

When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread, as Vann puts it, ‘of becoming something other than what he had always imagined himself to be’, and who had failed first as a dentist and then as a commercial fisherman in Alaska — blew his head off while talking on the phone to his second wife. ‘She heard parts of his head dripping from the ceiling,’ Vann told the New York Times not long ago. ‘She still can’t use the phone with that ear.’

That history of grief, violence and trouble haunts every page of this memoir. When it begins, 30-year-old Vann, with his cool and beautiful Nancy by his side, has already had some sea-adventures and disasters. He has done well professionally and has taught creative writing at Stanford and Cornell. He is kicking around the coast of Turkey and outside Bodrum he sees a giant, beautiful steel hull, 90 foot long, waiting to be fitted out and finished.