Books ought to be able to stand on their own, but perhaps it is important to know this about David Vann: a year after his stepmother’s mother had shot her husband and herself, his father also shot himself. Vann was 13 years old. The reason it’s important to know this is that what might seem implausible in the author’s new novel, Aquarium, probably does not at all seem like that to him.
Vann has mined these events for his writing. The second tragedy he treated in his first, much acclaimed, book, Legend of a Suicide (2008), a hybrid work containing bits of all sorts of genre, but concerned chiefly with a son’s relationship with his father. Subsequent novels, and Aquarium too, deal with the same subject, variations on a theme: the relationship between parent and child.
The earlier books were set in Alaska, where Vann was born; Aquarium moves further south, to Seattle, but the weather remains grey, rainy, cold.
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