Books: Child's empathy surfaces underwater

David Vann's lyrical writing limits any irritation with his repetitive use of imagery. Photo / Mathieu Bourgois

David Vann is surely one of the most powerful writers working today, and his most recent novels Caribou Island (2011) and Goat Mountain (2013) have much in common with this new book. All centre on families at various stages of disintegration as great, rattling skeletons escape from cupboards. His characters are damaged, often beyond repair, but most struggle to love the ones they're with and to be loved in return.

In all of his novels to date, redemption is his major theme - familial, spiritual and emotional. In Goat Mountain a child unwittingly commits manslaughter; in Caribou Island a man single-mindedly follows his dream and causes devastation.

Twelve-year-old Caitlin is our guide into Aquarium. She is the only much-loved child of Sheri Thompson who works as a labourer at a container port in Seattle. The two of them live in dreary, subsidised housing a long drive from the port. Every day Caitlin waits for hours after school for her mother at the aquarium and it's there that she meets a mysterious elderly man with whom she forms an intense friendship.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this seemingly dangerous liaison would take the most expected path, but Vann is a writer who surprises. The character who poses the most risk to the child is the one we least expect.

Caitlin's voice is tough, insightful and honest. Like many children with difficult lives she is mature beyond her years. She is curious and keen to learn, and her light-hearted remarks about her teachers at school betray the poor standard of education she receives. The aquarium provides knowledge for her and extra layers of meaning for the reader, even if Vann's fishy research does occasionally pop its head above the narrative.

Caitlin sees the world as a giant aquarium, often feeling as though she is underwater, and the characters that people her life remind her of various sea creatures. The eggplant parmigiana Sheri's boyfriend cooks for her lies flat on the bottom of her plate like a flatfish, "hidden away".

In a violent scene, when the old man has his car smashed up he goes to the bottom, lying across the seat. "Dashlights making an aquarium of the interior of his car, pieces of safety glass hanging in bright pebbled waves, light blue, an ocean made brittle somehow and broken ..."

If the marine imagery occasionally seems overcooked, Vann's lyrical writing limits any irritation.

Sheri is the most complex character of the novel, fierce and even unlikeable, but as the tragic secrets of her earlier life are gradually laid bare, reader empathy doesn't really diminish. Observed through Caitlin's eyes, her actions are frightening and irrational, fuelled by the desire for revenge. The child notes: "Rage was what had held her together for so long." It's when the mother's prejudices and lack of worldliness cruelly judge Caitlin that she finds it difficult to forgive her.

After the old man's true identity has been revealed, he observes, "One life can never know another's" and this seems to be Vann's message in this novel, whether it's a life lived corralled by poor choices and poverty, or life in another element.

Aquarium
by David Vann
(Text $37)

Stephanie Johnson is an Auckland writer.

- Canvas