By JANICE CAHILL
STAFF WRITER
From the moment I picked up Deb Olin Unferth's first novel at the McSweeney's table during last year's Miami International Book Festival, I knew it was something wildly different than anything I had ever read. I would expect nothing less from McSweeney's, a publisher known for works with eccentric and whimsical themes.
Immediately I was intrigued by the unusual and quirky prose, as well as the unsettling effect of the frequently shifting point of view. "Vacation" is a witty, peculiar and existential novel that weaves tricky wordplay with multiple intertwining stories creating a mystery, of sorts, and requiring the reader to pay attention.
The book focuses on a man, named Myers, who follows his wife, never named, who is following a stranger during the first two years of their marriage. The marriage disintegrates. The stranger leaves town and Myers follows in search of answers as to why his marriage fell apart. Along the way Myers encounters various characters who all seem to be searching for something.
In an interview last year with Time Out New York, Unferth described her desire to capture the "deeply lonely" and "inherently obnoxious" feeling of being a tourist. "You go around staring at people," she said, "you feel like you're intruding, and I tried to capture that."
But the book is not really about being a tourist or even a geographical journey. Unferth's exploration is of the character's psyches. She is both disorienting and enchanting in her ability to construct and dismantle the mundane.
"In truth," she writes, "here is the story: A man leaves a place. A man leaves another place. And another . . . It is just a series of departures, of doors closing, a briefcase snapping shut. Nothing becomes clearer. Nobody changes."
Adept at capturing the intricacies of the human experience, Unferth uses every sentence as a dreamy and surreal opportunity to create a narrative of profound depth.
"You know how it is to want something," Unferth writes. "Desire builds like a little house in your head and it sits there, half constructed in your mind. Women who want children are this way. Artists are this way about pictures. It doesn't go away. You may forget for a few months but then it's back, the unfinished pieces of what you want."
As the story progresses, tiny events set off chain reactions that tangle, twist and unravel, pulling the reader along for the ride. Sometimes funny, other times disturbing, "Vacation" is a short book that will leave you scratching your head and mesmerized by the experience.
"Vacation," by Deb Olin Unferth, McSweeney's Publishing, 240 pages, $22, hardback
Leave a comment