Dirt

March 26, 2012
There’s a kind of sadistic integrity to this story of putrefying family life and mental breakdown in 1980s Northern California, Vann’s follow-up to last year’s Caribou Island. Galen, a relentlessly unpleasant 22-year-old loser, lives at home with his mother on a family estate slowly being smothered by the encroaching suburbs. They spend identical days after days quietly hating each other and regularly visiting a dementia-afflicted grandmother; sometimes Galen’s aunt and 17-year-old cousin come along from sheer force of habit. His aunt shares his hatred for his mother’s false cheer (and resents her for being set to inherit all the family money), while his cousin cruelly amuses herself at Galen’s poorly hidden sexual interest in her. Galen’s adolescent spirituality and odd behaviors are grating, but fairly benign until the toxic stew of pentup anger and dysfunction threatens the family’s queasy equilibrium, pushing him to a breaking point. The last third or more of the book comprise his slowly worsening descent into madness (or evil). Vann’s evocation in readers of great annoyance followed by dawning horror at his main character is smartly disorienting, allowing him to plumb sickening depths by believable degrees. Agent: Kim Witherspoon and David Forrer, Inkwell Management.

Starred review from March 15, 2012

With his second novel (after Caribou Island), internationally acclaimed writer Vann brings us into the troubled world of 22-year-old Galen. Galen lives with his mother, Suzie-Q, a broken woman who uses make-believe to hide family secrets. Their existence on the dying family walnut farm depends on the fortune of Galen's grandmother, who has been shuttled off to a nursing home. Fighting for a piece of the family wealth is Suzie-Q's sister Helen and her precocious 17-year-old daughter, Jennifer. Galen wants to break free of this dysfunctional family, but a hoped-for college education never happens. Suzie-Q controls the checkbook and tells everyone that the trust fund barely pays for the upkeep of the large house and grounds. Galen espouses all manner of New Age practices, hoping for ultimate enlightenment to escape his mother's suffocating attention. Instead, his spiritual awakening happens with his cousin Jennifer, who teases him with sexual games. When Suzie-Q witnesses one such game, she ends up threatening Galen--and Galen's deranged world comes to an end in a powerful and gruesome finale. VERDICT Vann has a remarkable gift for capturing the harsh realities of a family held together by hate and violence. Riveting and impossible to put down. [See Prepub Alert, 1/16/12.]--Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2012
After his widely acclaimed first novel, Vann touches on some of the same themes here: enlightenment through labor, the inevitability of violence, the contentious relationship between mother and son. Vann takes us to the early '80s in California's Central Valley. Galen, in his 20s, lives on a crumbling family estate. Grandma, rich but with Alzheimer's, has been dispatched to an old-folks home, leaving just Galen and his mother, Suzie-Q, to drink high tea under the fig tree. Emaciated from his attempts at earthly transcendence, Galen divides his time between reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull, listening to the strains of Kitaro, and masturbating to porn. He dreams of college but is falsely told there isn't the money. His aunt and teenage cousin Jennifer visit for venom-filled dinners after which Jennifer tortures Galen with comically sadistic sex games. Galen lives in a curious limbo: In the hodgepodge of his esoteric understanding, life is an illusion, but the temptations of desire and anger seem real enough. After a disastrous family trip to the cabin (Aunt Helen tricks Grandma into giving her a few hundred grand, Suzie-Q spies on Galen and Jennifer having sex), Galen and his mother return home, and Vann's novel journeys to its fetid center. Galen's mother decides to call the police on Galen for "raping" his underage cousin, and so Galen locks her in the shed. For the ensuing hundred pages Galen does battle--with his mother, their past, the very notion of reality and who owns it. It is difficult for Suzie-Q to plead mercy when Galen insists she is simply an attachment preventing his enlightenment. His labor is his meditation: shoveling dirt around the edges of the shed, nailing boards to prevent her escape. Meanwhile, his mother, illusion or not, is dying. There is something of Beckett here in their cruel conversations that never get to the heart of the matter, that always seem to affirm Galen's slim hold on reality. At turns savage and comic, Vann's richly complex novel does what the best literature does: It makes demands on its readers.

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April 15, 2012
Galen is 22 and still lives with his needy mother on their dilapidated walnut orchard in California. Their trust fund has been depleted due to the cost of institutionalizing Galen's grandmother, who is suffering from dementia. In a bid to channel his frustration over not being able to go to college, Galen pursues New Age practices with a vengeance, attempting to meditate, walk on water and hot coals, and adhere to a vegetarian diet. When his bitter aunt and seductive cousin, who believe they have been cheated out of their inheritance, join Galen's family for a weekend retreat at their cabin in the Sierras, their dysfunctional dynamics push Galen toward an epic confrontation with his mother, whose demands have finally overwhelmed him. Rather than achieving the calm he so desperately craves, Galen instead succumbs to his most primal instincts. Multi-award winner Vann (Caribou Island, 2011) writes undeniably powerful prose, whether he is blithely satirizing transcendental meditation or meticulously detailing Galen's descent into madness. Reading like an especially visceral psychological horror novel, this is not for the faint of heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)