Between Saying and Hearing

Abstract

Page 17 January–February 2009 B O O K R E V I E W S Between Saying and Hearing Steve Tomasula The prose of Vacation is as pristine as its subplots are intricate. Vacation Deb Olin Unferth McSweeney’s http://www.mcsweeneys.net 216 pages; cloth, $22.00 In Deb Olin Unferth’s novel, a vacation isn’t something a person takes so much as the hole they leave behind. Claire’s mother leaves a “vacation” in her daughter’s life by dying, as did her biological father by leaving when she was an infant; Myers’s wife vacates her marriage by following a stranger to see where people go when they “leave”; Myers likewise leaves the marriage, first by following his wife following the stranger, whom he mistakes for an old college classmate, Gray, and then by pursuing Gray to Nicaragua. Except Gray is on “vacation” in Panama. The novel is dense with these types of vacations: one leaving, another following as though sucked along by the resulting undertow. Even chickens follow each other. Why? “No one wants to be alone and someone has to be in the lead.” If it’s not clear from this description, Vacation has the capacity for surprise and kinetic energy of a cartoon as Myers learns while on an unauthorized “vacation.” Before being caught in a Nicaraguan earthquake, he receives an email: “From: HR. Subject : Termination of Employment.” Say rather, it’s an existential comedy: Samuel Beckett applied to the contemporary world where instead of clowns waiting for Godot, a character might find himself penniless in a foreign country because his charge card was deactivated. By his wife back home. One passage opens with the Beckett-like line, “The day was invading through the windows and under the doors,” then follows Myers from his waking on the couch to being dropped off at the train station by his wife who is kicking him out. In the car, Myers reminisces about how he once waxed poetically to his wife, telling her how after a life spent together the day would eventually come when they would be laid to rest in the same cemetery. To which she replies: “Gross.” There are no happy reunions in this novel. Or reunions of any kind. Rather, there are missed connections , too-early departures, and too-late arrivals. There are virtual connections, as well as real connections that may as well not exist because no one sees them. Or as Myers’s wife puts it while looking at the stranger she’s been following: “I felt connected to him and who knows that I wasn’t? He could be related to me for all I know. He could be my brother. He could have once been my lover during my early crazy days. You never know. We could be married somehow….” Conceptual artist Vito Acconci once created a performance in which each day for a month he followed a random stranger. In each case, the artist ’s will was marginalized, his path determined by chance encounters. To get a sense of the worldview that develops throughout the course of Vacation, imagine each of its characters as Acconci. Now add to this chain of follow-the-leader the reader, turning pages to follow characters who are following clues that may or may not be clues, getting lost in a funhouse of mirrored identities. That is, rather than just describe the disconnects between children and parents, spouses and lovers, the novel involves readers as participants who must sort out mirror from mirror image, character from left-handed reflection. Everyone’s volition is marginalized by circumstance, accidents of birth or function (or reading), making individuals who they are and life what it is for them. Or as Claire learns by reading a note left for her by her dead mother, her biological father, a Mexican dolphin trainer whom she’d never met, and her step-father, the burnt-out, Willy Loman-eque,Anglo businessman who raised her, were for all practical purposes “nearly interchangeable. You could switch their clothes, their occupations, countries of origin, and you might confuse them.” Which is to say everything about them is different. Which is to...