Just in time for Valentine's Day, the Guardian in London has reviewed and raved about The Secret Language of Sleep. And, for the rest of the week, you can buy it for $5!
A man follows his wife. The wife follows a stranger. The stranger leaves town and the man goes after him, determined to settle the score. But the man is not the only one looking for the stranger, and the stranger has troubles of his own. Amid all this, the earth quakes, a boy leaps out a window, and a dolphin swims free. Of course people have adventures of this kind—of course! of course!—but we've never heard of it before. With deadpan humor and skewed wordplay, Deb Olin Unferth weaves a mystery of hope and heartbreak.
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Praise.
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"Wonderful, addictive prose. Ms. Unferth sure knows how to turn a phrase and it's a delight to follow her across the American landscape."
—Gary Shteyngart
"Part mystery, part sonata. Unferth writes like a musician plays, weaving images and themes and melodies with these beautifully rhythmic, funny, heartbreaking sentences. The whole novel should be read aloud and relished."
—Aimee Bender
"Deb Olin Unferth is, I believe, one of the crucial literary artists of her generation. Her fictions give evidence of an artist determined to speak about the remarkable, who manages with exactitude all elements necessary to produce the well-made, eccentric object. Her vision evokes high comedy and the violence of tragedy heard through voices exquisitely particular to her mind."
—Diane Williams
The Village Voice
"Deb Olin Unferth's Holiday in Delirium: A Strange Trip Indeed!"
By Elizabeth Hand
August 26, 2008
Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth's dreamy, surreal debut novel, reads like an extended hallucination or out-of-body experience, as unsettling as it is compelling. The fragmented narrative is an intricate cross-hatch of character and misprision: A man named Meyers stalks his wife, whom he suspects is having an affair with an old acquaintance named Gray. The wife, never named, follows Gray across Manhattan, but it's a random, compulsive pastime she engages in while her marriage unravels; she doesn't know Gray, doesn't know he's her husband's friend, doesn't know that Gray's own marriage has ended. Meanwhile, a young woman seeks the biological father she has never met, an eco-terrorist who liberates captive dolphins.
The action unfolds like a postmodern—or perhaps post-mortem—farce. Paths nearly cross, old friends nearly meet, lovers and parents and children almost reunite. Odd, sometimes absurdist correspondences between character and setting take the place of traditional plot. There are hints of posthumous fantasy, of reality filtered through delirium (Gray's experiences are colored by the brain tumor he doesn't know he has). E-mails, earthquakes, kidnapped dolphins, delayed flights, death are all given equal weight. The result is a post-realist novel, similar to Ed Park's Personal Days, Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, or Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances.
Unferth's prose is lovely, at once precise and startling: "A man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were wrapped in air and light."
In many ways, Vacation functions more like a video installation than a novel. One catches multiple glimpses of Meyers's marriage and his wife's pursuit of Gray; of Gray's slide into dementia and his wife's futile attempts to find him in Managua. "We chase the thing we flee," muses Meyers's wife, but none of Vacation's myriad pursuits end well: "Where do you go when you leave? Nowhere, it turned out." Sometimes it's safest just to stay home.
In Deb Olin Unferth's Vacation, people are always following each other from one place to another, starting with Myers, a middling office worker whose main distinguishing characteristic is a dent in his skull from jumping out a window when he was young. When he discovers that his wife is spending her evenings following a man named Gray through the streets of New York City, he begins to follow her himself, a process that stretches wordlessly through the first two years of their marriage. Later, after Myers and his wife decide to separate, Myers goes looking for Gray directly, leading to yet another chase that takes him across the Americas in search of a man who, if not exactly a rival, is still the closest thing Myers has to a cause for the dissolution of his marriage. There are other characters throughout the book who have their own loved ones or enemies to follow, each of their stories intersecting the love triangle of Myers, his wife, and Gray, until the book is just one more place for its characters to get lost in, to lose sight of their goals, to find, if not what they were looking, then maybe something they needed instead.
Unferth's first book was a slim volume of flash fiction titled Minor Robberies published as part of a boxed set called One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box, which also included collections of short-shorts by Dave Eggers and Sarah Manguso. In Minor Robberies, Unferth showed off a remarkable talent for odd characters and tightly compressed language, two qualities that are often found in great flash writers but rarely translate directly to their longer works. Not so with Unferth. Her language in Vacation is a triumph of tightly wound sentences, each one compact and powerful and simply waiting for the reader's eye to allow it to spring forth into action. For instance, consider the following paragraph, one of the many imagined speeches Myers considers giving Gray when he finally finds him:
What's that you say? You don't know what this is about? Maybe a little drill in the earhole will jog your memory. Maybe a little claw of the old clawhammer to the knee. Maybe some take-out, as in, let's take this outside. As in, let's take your fingers outside, one by one, toss them out the window. Then let's see what you know and don't.
Small satisfactions, and who knows, maybe big ones too.
Here, Unferth dips in close, the narrator's voice giving way to Myers's internal dialogue, but in other places it zooms in and out, swooping here and there for views of different characters and for different perspectives on now familiar events. Like a long single-shot film sequence, Unferth's prose is capable of following a series of events linearly while simultaneously shifting point of view and distance to great effect. This technique is used from the first page on but becomes more complex as the book progresses, culminating in stunningly intricate chapters such as the one in which Myers's wife "confesses," a chapter which contains at least four perspectives (Myers, his wife, a man named Spoke, and the narrator's), all rendered differently from paragraph to paragraph without losing continuity or cohesion. The amount of technical skill this takes is extraordinary, but Unferth makes it look easy, connecting chapter to chapter with a virtuoso display of writing ability.
As the story progresses, the obstacles begin to pile up against Myers, starting with such pedestrian problems as losing his job or Gray not being at home when Myers goes looking for him, but eventually ranging all the way up to a series of natural disasters (he suffers through both an earthquake and an impending hurricane). Still, his search continues for Gray and for answers to why his marriage soured and then fell apart. Along the way, he meets other travelers—other vacationers—each of them looking for something or someone else. In a book that often use description as a means of definition (such as when Myers's packed luggage is referred to as "just pieces of cloth, cut, dyed, arranged, and sealed together with thread to approximate the shape of his body"), it takes almost the entire book before the prose turns its attention to what a vacation itself really is:
A vacation is simply, you know, to vacate. The vacationer leaves the home (leaves the mind), leaves the home empty (except for what he left behind (her)), that's all.
No, no, that's not a vacation, if you simply move to a different spot. That's just looking at stuff, familiar stuff.
What's so familiar about this? Myers would certainly like to know.
As Myers discovers the nature of his vacation, he also discovers the truth of his marriage, of how he and his wife have perhaps both failed each other by vacating their mutual home in search of answers instead of looking for them in each other. Unferth's great triumph here is how she depicts this marital dissolution using not only her gift for magnificent, sharp prose, but her ability to see how sometimes the tiniest events can set off chain reactions of doubt and deceit, allowing her story to grow like a grain of sand that eventually becomes a pearl. Vacation is a remarkable and ambitious must-read, and Unferth herself an exciting writer to keep watch on. Without a doubt, there are more great things still to come.
Bookforum
Review: Vacation
By Thomas Israel Hopkins
Sept./Oct./Nov. 2008
Myers, the hapless, briefcase-toting nine-to-fiver of Deb Olin Unferth's debut novel, Vacation, wonders why his wife has suddenly started coming home late from work "mussed" and "ruddy." When he begins leaving his office at the end of each day, going to her office, and following her, he discovers that she is indeed cheating on him—albeit only emotionally. She's been coming home late because she leaves work, goes to yet another office, and follows a strange man, who, coincidentally, is an acquaintance of Myers's from college.
Myers's wife, who is never named, is drawn to the "quiet, sad dignity" of the strange man, whose name is Gray. She also likes the "meandering" paths of his evening walks, "as if he'd been plopped onto this land from some foreign star." The wife gives up her pursuit when Gray's peripateticism (which, it turns out, has its basis not in space-alien whimsy but in a brain tumor) leads him out of New York City and, after a detour through his old college town, down to Central America. Myers, however, keeps after Gray, eventually walking out of his own life and into the hot Managua night.
Meanwhile, a young woman whose soap-star mother died when she was a child is on her way to Chicago to view her mom's papers. While in town, she learns the identity of her biological father. At the same time, an antisocial Mexican, who steals dolphins from aquariums and returns them to the wild, relates his own history. More voices chime in. A minor earthquake damages a Nicaraguan Internet café. Hotel employees give chase to Myers after his wife reports their credit cards stolen. A dolphin is liberated amid a hurricane.
Myers's story, the solo act that opens Vacation, is a slow start, due to the overriding concern in those pages with the way in which he and his wife argue. The third-person narrator meticulously describes the fights between Myers and his wife but deliberately resists particularizing: "They fought about round tin objects, lids, water, other liquids, other things having to do with liquid"; "They had not fought about the outlines of things." But once Myers gets fired by e-mail, the earthquake hits, the first-person voices kick in (nine in total, including "local nun" and "sexy woman in bikini"), and the wild-dolphin chase commences, the tale hits its entertaining stride.
Myers's narrator is revealed—gradually, but with increasing frequency—to be misanthropic, not to mention cynical about the job of storytelling. ("In truth, here is the story: A man leaves a place. A man leaves another place. And another. And another ... Nothing becomes clearer. Nobody changes.") But the quirky, metafictional gloom is part of the charm of this novel and is a critical gear in the apparatus that propels it to its lonely conclusion in a far-flung corner of the earth.
Corduroybooks.com
"Root Words and End Results"
By Weston Cutter
August 27, 2008
The word mesmerize is an eponym; the root of the word started simply as a guy's last name. Franz Mesmer was a precursor to the art/skill/whatever that would later be called hypnotism, and his name eventually lent itself to the world of adjectives. It's worth bearing in mind—both the story of the word's root and the word itself—when considering the absolutely incredible debut novel by Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation, published by McSweeney's. Certainly there are hundreds of books each year published that are labeled "mesmerizing" by someone or other; Deb Olin Unferth's book not only is mesmerizing, but her writing, her witchily clear and strange and startling sentences, almost demand that her name be adjectivized as well. Reading Vacation, you will be Unferthed.
Vacation begins with a two and a half page account, by a woman named Claire, about her mother and father, but that thread's quickly put aside as the novel's driving plot unfolds. There's a man named Myers, his head strangely shaped from a childhood injury, married to a woman whose name we never discover. Myers has been following his wife as of late, and has discovered, through following her, that she is following someone else, a man named Gray, an acquaintance of Myers' from college. The story opens with Myers going to Syracuse to confront Gray, presuming that something must be going on with Gray and Myers' wife if she's following him around the city like he knows she is (a fact she won't admit, and a fact he doesn't, until halfway through the book, confront her about). If the plot sounds even remotely convoluted or awkward or anything, it's not: it's maybe simpler to say that Vacation is the story of one man moving, a woman following him, and a man following that woman.
Yet through what sounds like a pretty simple plot, Unferth is able to create (she may even be said to weave, a word that usually makes me squirm when used for anything other than the verb for how to make a rug) a story of almost shocking resonance and depth. Simple questions that might occur to you to ask a friend if he came to you and said he was following his wife, who was following a recognizable acquaintance: why not ask your wife what she's doing? What is it you wish to 'discover' instead of simply 'know'? Doesn't simple curiosity become something larger, danger, more strange, when it becomes a search? And the real question: what is it you hope to find?
I have no friend who follow wives who are following acquaintances. I'd like to think if I did, I'd ask those questions above. However, Myers' need to dis- and uncover the details of what he presumes to be some infidelity reveal the far scarier, much simpler, darker workings of most of our hearts: the need to make sense of what we don't understand, the need to make meaning. Given details, we craft narrative—true or false, impossible or simple. Vacation is, in I think profound ways, the story of a narrative being first constructed and then dismantled.
Claire, for the record, returns to the novel and plays a sort of shadow role to Myers' wife (or maybe not: maybe that's me making a narrative out of detail). Myers, his wife, and Gray are not alone, either: from Syracuse to Nicaragua to Panama, the reader meets a handful of other, seemingly ancillary (but never insignificant) characters. Too, it's worth noting that there's an active narrator somewhere in this book, and if that sounds bizarre, I urge you to pick up a copy and notice the structure: most chunks of text come in (at most) a handful of paragraphs, and different voices and points of view jump in and out of the way, fluid as athletes. There's some narrator; not only, in fact, is there some narrator, but a narrator who seems in dialogue with another narrator, or perhaps only in dialogue with itself. It looks silly and dumb written out like what: what it feels like when you come across it is like you've found a friend on the inside. It's a startling, gutsy, great move on Deb Olin Unferth's part.
Okay, so: despite all the various trickery and wild fun the plot and characters offer the reader, the reason Unferth deserves her own adjective is because of her sentences. I'm opening at random:
"Hello, elevate! Unless he wanted to lose the thing!
He propped his arm against the wall." (p.140)
"In an earthquake, if trapped, the experts advise, do not light a match, do not move or kick, do not shout. Use a whistle or tap on a pipe.
Yes, one should always carry a whistle in earthquake country because you might be crushed under a building and not able to holler for help but only able to breathe lightly into your whistle. Or you might be buried alive under the bricks and have just enough air to toot, while your voice, should you have the strength to scream, is absorbed into the dust and paint. Or you might be flung far from civilization and have two broken feet so you can't walk back and two broken arms so you can't drag yourself over the dirt but you do have this handy whistle which, if you are too far to be heard or rescued, can be used as solo entertainment while you wait to slowly die." (p. 90)
"The next time, he was there and he followed. She went off. The background blurred in his eye. She stopped, sat on a bench on the loudest corner the earth had ever known. A catastrophe of buses and drillings, the dash of the taxi, the rush and half, the tamping down of the cement, the suck of air in, the press of it out, the slow sink of the city, the spread of tar, the lifting of it, the footsteps going through, the out and out of breaths. He watched. In front of him two children knocked around a construction cone.
Who the hell did she think she was, sitting there like that?" (p. 36)
No joke, at random, those three passages; any page in this book has at least equal treasures awaiting. They conveniently, too, highlight some of the things Unferth does better than almost anybody I know of: she's fucking hysterically funny (figure 1); her sentences seem to follow the contour of a mind in the process of thinking (figure 2); she can put together prettier phrases and sentences and jamb them into this jumbo sentence rich with muscle and gut and feeling and startling beauty (seriously: a catastrophe of buses and drillings? Fucking hell: it makes me want to give up writing).
This is Deb Olin Unferth's second book (both, by the way, from McSweeney's, and let's just acknowledge that McSweeney's is no longer something exclusively for hipsters, nor some stone on which bitter, angry critics can grind themselves for being insular or exclusive: these people have now published two of the most audaciously great books of fiction (Sal Plascencia's People of Paper and Deb Olin Unferth's Vacation) (to say absolutely nothing of the great stuff they've been publishing in the journal, the best most recently being, from issue 23, Clancy Martin and Caren Beilin, and if you don't have 23, seriously, buy it)). Again: this is Deb Olin Unferth's second book. It's an astonishing book for any author, at any point in her/his career. Here's a guess: Unferth will be one of a small group of authors who will likely dictate not the direction fiction may go in the coming decades, but the shape and scope fiction may take. Whatever pessimism you harbor, bring that fact to bear on it and I promise you'll feel better. Write Deb Olin Unferth, write McSweeney's, write everyone: tell everyone to read the book. And, of course, as soon as possible, read the book.
Time Out New York
"How, Voyager?: Novelist Deb Olin Unferth Goes on an Unsentimental Journey"
By Drew Toal
Issue: Aug 28–Sep 3, 2008
For most people, traveling is supposed to be a time of personal rejuvenation and general R&R—a period when you shouldn't have to do anything more strenuous than order a frozen margarita. Deb Olin Unferth's inventive debut novel, Vacation, turns that idea on its head. Her characters might visit foreign beaches and linger in Internet cafes, but they are primarily careening into existential crisis. Though the book features multiple intertwined story lines, it focuses on a man named Myers, who undertakes a manic quest through Central America looking for a man who he thinks has seduced his wife. Instead, he finds earthquakes, dodges aggressive Christian missionaries and gets stuck with a group of awkward vacationers. Along for the ride, the reader quickly begins to wonder if this unhinged man's sanity is intact.
"There is something deeply lonely about being a tourist," the 37-year-old Unferth, who splits time between Kansas and New York, tells TONY over coffee in the East Village. "It's also kind of inherently obnoxious. You go around staring at people, you feel like you're intruding, and I tried to capture that." Vacation belongs to a long tradition of literature about excursions gone awry, and Unferth says that she was influenced by novelist Paul Bowles's 1949 Sahara death trip, The Sheltering Sky. Still, she felt that his off-the-map story was impossible to re-create in this era of hypercommercialized tourism. "There was something that Bowles was able to do then that is much more difficult to do now," she says. "Today, it's much harder to get truly lost."
Though Unferth doesn't write much about uncharted geographical territory, her book excels at exploring the remote reaches of her characters' psyches. "It may feel like Myers is running away from his wife, but really he just ends up looking deeper and deeper into what destroyed the marriage," explains the author. "He's not getting away from her at all." Other characters in the book experience similar journeys: Spoke, an expat whom Myers meets in the Nicaraguan Granada, is a wanderer who is just confronting the fact that he no longer belongs anywhere.
Vacation's point of view shifts frequently, and the alternating voices have the unsettling effect of keeping the reader, like the characters, on unsteady ground. And yet the author manages to weave these diverging narratives into a coherent story. "I listened to Bach's fugues over and over, some more than a hundred times, trying to understand how to create something like that on the page," the author says. "The beauty of it for me is the way a piece can build, gain momentum, with all of those voices working together."
Unferth manages to inject some humor into her chorus of crisis. At one point, Myers caves in and goes on a sightseeing excursion with several annoying Christians (they convince him to go by saying that it will be a "secular walk"). Naturally, the first stop is an old church. "I was really careful not to make Myers a sightseer, because that's not what he was there for," asserts the author. "He had a mission, but I still wanted to embrace the absurdity of tourists."
But in the end, Vacation's farcical moments are detours on its journey through personal hells. McSweeney's Books, Unferth's publisher, has long been characterized as a haven for literary jokesters, but as recent publications such as Dave Eggers's What Is the What? and Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital suggest, the press has been infusing its imaginative leaps with more-somber themes. Vacation fits snugly in the young press's less-whimsical second wave. "I think it's a really sad book," asserts Unferth. "People just looking for something cute probably won't enjoy it that much." In the end, Myers understands that he will never find the man he's looking for, and that if he does, it won't do anything to fix his problems with his wife. But Unferth has him continue on his pointless journey anyway. "I wanted to express that moment when someone acts passionately and does something even though they know it's irrational," the author says. "There is something beautiful and dangerous in that."
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