Galen lay down in the hollow between two furrows, curled on his side. Breathing heavily, wet with sweat, the air cool now on his skin. His forehead in the dirt. The world only an illusion. This orchard, the long rows of trees, only a psychic space to hold the illusion of self and memory. His grandfather giving him rides on the old green tractor, the putting sound of the engine. His grandfather’s Panama hat, brown shirt, smell of wine on his breath, Riesling. The feel of the tractor tugging forward, the lurch as the front wheels passed over a furrow. All of that a training to feel the margins of things, the slipping, none of it real. The only problem was how to slip now beyond the edges of the dream. The dirt really felt like dirt.
For an outwardly “normal” person, I do love transgressive fiction (I’ve read plenty of Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk, Ottessa Moshfegh, etc.), and for the most part, details can’t get too perverse for me if they serve a narrative organically. I hadn’t read David Vann before and Dirt definitely fits the bill as transgressive: Disturbing family details, intergenerational abuse and mental illness, an isolated yet suffocating setting oppressed with heat and sweat and dirt. Told from the POV of a highly disturbed main character, I understood Galen’s motivations even if I was appalled by his actions, and I needed to take a brief break between each chapter to mentally brush the muck from my psyche before diving back in, anxious/dreading to learn what happened next. I admired Vann’s writing at both the sentence level and the overall picture and I would definitely pick up this author again (but totally understand that this sort of thing wouldn’t be for everyone.)
He ignored her, plunged the shovel deep into the earth, powered now by a force that was beyond muscle and bone. He was becoming the action itself. He was the dirt, and the shovel, and the movement, but more than that. He was a million miles removed. These hands were not his hands. This breath was not his breath. This mother was not his mother. This Galen was not Galen. He had to let it all go, let the movement happen without attachment.
As someone who has tended to solipsistic thinking myself, it was very intriguing to view the world from the POV of a character who takes this to the extreme: Galen is twenty-two, infantilised by his single mother (who says that the family trust they live off of can’t afford to send Galen to college, so he should just stay with her on the decrepit family farm for now, biding his time and joining her for afternoon tea and evenings chatting on a rug in front of the fireplace), and as he pursues a kind of self-education by reading authors like Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda, Galen has convinced himself that he is an old soul on his last incarnation and the people around him are inconsequential; distractions and illusions set as final obstacles on his path to nirvana. Between his isolation (the only people they interact with are extended family; all messed up), his lack of responsibilities (Galen runs naked in the fields by moonlight and then lays abed ’til noon), and perhaps a touch of sociopathy, Galen’s thinking is grandiose and immature and inconsistent; he aspires to asceticism, but succumbs to bursts of gluttony and carnal pleasure. Galen is such a unique character that, as repugnant as he would be to meet, seeing the world through his eyes — and learning the family history that created his present — makes everything that happens understandable and inevitable.
And the setting: A declining walnut farm in California’s Central Valley outside Sacramento, the decrepitude and the drought and the baking heat all inexorably bear down on the characters; this is literally (not literally) a pressure cooker. Early on, Vann writes: Galen could feel the earth leaning closer to the sun, could feel the land shouldering its way forward, pulling the hot sack of melt behind it. And that heat (and the attending sweat and stink and grime) is like a character itself, and I loved what Vann made of it.
The meaning of dirt was this, perhaps. The shovel removing time. The eons it took to form the dirt from rock. The water and air that had to work through millions or even billions of years to free it, and then its travel and settling and waiting, layer upon layer. His life now such a brief flash. Any attachment was absurdity. This was what the dirt taught. If he could remain focused on geologic time, human time could never reach him.
I can concede that Dirt might appeal more to my own narrow tastes than it would to the average reader, but appeal (if that’s even the right word) it did and I’m happy to have discovered a new author.
