Wolf in White Van

Reading is by its nature a private event. You get a book when you want, about what you want and think whatever you please as you work through it. This is not what I personally like best about the process but still, it has an appeal. Maybe some of our aversion to assigned reading back in school came as a result of this. Or I am still making excuses for not getting my homework done. My High School librarian once caught me reading books that were not from class and was kind enough, no wise enough, no, Cool enough to take me aside and share with me more works by the same author that were not available on the shelves. They were videos, but still, how great is that? Thanks go out to her. I should have never been quiet in the first place.

Wolf in White Van is going to be a hard book to talk about. I mentioned in my first post that I would discuss works I related to even if this was difficult to admit. Wolf is dark and visceral and saying you can see yourself in it is risky. But, the book hit me pretty hard and now I’ve got to sort it all out.

Sean is a young man who is horribly disfigured by a gun accident. While in the hospital he created a role playing game that he now conducts via mail correspondence with subscribing players. He rarely leaves the house and he interacts with very few people. We see the world through him.

The disfigurement is as present for the reader throughout most of the book as it is for Sean. The descriptions aren’t necessarily graphic but they are constant. Sean’s past surfaces slowly as the book moves from recent events back to more complicated times.

I’ll admit wanting to like this book. The descriptions sounded like something I’d be into. I heard it included critiques on modern culture, violence, all kinds of Natural Born Killers-type stuff I liked as a kid, and still do mostly now. And I did like it from the start but I could not point to a specific reason why. Sean’s life is slow, as you can imagine being primarily a shut in, and his observations are very dry, almost detached. We find him kind of settled in his mind or resigned I should say, though whether this is real or not we can’t judge, since we hear only from him.

This main character is not an anti-hero, or even a complete bad guy disguised as something noble. He is a whole new creature and though this is not what I valued most in the book, I imagine it is what the Author is being lauded for. Sean is complex and frightening, unsettling to say the least, and I never really knew if he was damaged or a psychopath from the start. There was numbness in his voice that I had not encountered before.

I picked up Wolf at the same time that I found the graphic novel Wizzywig, by Ed Piskor and read them fairly close to each other. The protagonist in the comic is similar to Wolf’s in that he suffers a great deal but can’t truly be called a hero or even a decent guy. Check that out too if you really want to take things too far. Come on, you know you do. Also, I believe Piskor is from Pittsburgh so back him up. Go Bucs! I’m digressing…(are ellipses okay? Parentheses? I’ll decide later).

I moved on through the story pretty much hooked but not sure how. I was expecting not so much a big reveal, which the story teases, but some piece I knew would be relevant to me. The narrator takes his time and his shattered pictures eventually start to come together.

Loneliness is hard to admit but isolation is terrifying. Sean is much more a victim of the latter. I would normally be thrilled to see the stay in your room daydreaming, music listening, fantasy character obsessed young person in literature but when his endgame is this guy’s, frankly I was chilled. I remember how serious things seemed back in those days. I love the conversation I had with a friend of mine a few years ago where we saluted the times in our youths spent alone in our rooms cranking tunes and watching movies. I look back on those Friday nights fondly now even though they may have sucked at the time. Those were the days, painful as they seemed, and I still love the same stuff.

Sean’s isolation never ends. The times, and they are few, when it comes anywhere close to ending are the book’s most heartbreaking. I will be going back to read more than a few of those. I also loved the parents, hell, all of the brief side characters. They are shadows for the most part. They exist in the corner of the narrator’s eyes but they still grow and become pin holes in the black sheet of his point of view. In fact there are a lot of narrow spaces to fall through in this book and I hope you find them all. In the end that has been the real hard part of writing about it, the potential expanse of the whole thing despite it's economic length, not the fact that I might have also done my time in the confinements of the archetypal teenage headspace.

John Darnielle is nominated for the National Book Award for Wolf. The awards are coming up soon so keep your eyes and ears open. I’m pulling for him. I’ll also have a lot more about the NBA’s in the future but in what form, I’m not sure yet. The Author was also a member of the band the Mountain Goats who I am not familiar with but I imagine if you are a fan of his music you would be freaking out over his novel. You think I can’t still recite Jim Morrison’s poetry? You know I can. Stop the tape, hit rewind. We got nothing but time sitting here in this room.