Book Review

Vacation
by Deb Olin-Unferth
McSweeneys, 2008
www.mcsweeneys.com
ISBN-10: 1934781096

Vacation is a study of the unsaid. It examines what is suppressed between three major characters: the unnamed wife, her husband Meyers, and a man called Gray. The inability to express her basic needs creates the space for the wife to wordlessly follow Gray. The husband wordlessly follows his wife as his wife follows Gray. The three keep their distance, tracing strange paths through a city. Gray goes into a restaurant. The wife follows, sits at the bar and sips hot tea. The husband watches the wife through the window. Gray is unaware that he is part of this triangle. And to make things a little stranger, Gray is a former colleague of the husband. Instead of letting his wife know that he is aware of her infatuation with Gray, the husband follows her. He must create their story in his mind instead of finding the truth from her.

His mission for revenge, for answers of some sort, sends him to Latin America in search of Gray. This trip is the origin of the title. The characters do not vacation from themselves, however. Everyone is missing the person they want or need to see. Connections are lost; Gray is lost in Latin America with a brain tumor, the wife is lost in her silence, the husband lost in his pursuit of Gray. What does everyone want? What connection do they need?

These questions, thankfully, are not answered. We are left with characters emotionally and physically deformed by their desires. We hear this from a secondary character:

Today I thought about the man that raised me because of a man that sat down next to me on the train. He had a strangely shaped head. It seemed to be almost dented a little. He kept to himself on his seat and I kept to myself on my seat. We regarded each other.

That line, "We regarded each other," displays Unferth's incredible detached, straight-faced tone. In five sentences we learn about fractured families, separation and the way our bodies move in these spaces. We aren't told the connection between the man's dented head and memory of the "man that raised her." It is just presented and the story moves on.

Unferth’s sentences are enviably constructed. They are short, hard bursts of information that build on each other.

One day when I was five, my mother was hit by a car and she felt it and she died and we felt it. We went away for a while, paid off our debts from afar, tried to live without her. We came back to the city. My father’s business spoiled dollar by dollar. We lived on her money. Each year we grew poorer.

I am amazed by the amount of information the reader gets in such a short time. The whole story is there, including how the narrator feels. There isn't an extra word. Unferth condenses, condenses, condenses. She is a skilled flash fiction writer, as displayed in her first book, Minor Robberies. What makes her so unique is her ability to translate the sparseness of flash into such a twisting, intense novel. I can confidently say that reading Vacation prompted me to begin writing fiction again. I was drawn in and excited by her use of language in a way that I haven't experienced in some time. Vacation slowly draws out the oxygen of a room. I was left gasping and delirious.—Kate Wyer