Imagine its white underside against the white dust and ash and sand or whatever it is on the moon, looking identical, like a mirror image, and that dark topside looking like the moon from farther away, patterns like craters. Dark side of the moon, essentially. The halibut has been waiting for this meeting, waiting for millions of years, brought home, finally. Destiny. And then it hits both ends, hard, like wings, and the gravity is so much less. Even on Earth, they can launch a few feet above deck. But on the moon, this halibut flew.
I don’t know if the story behind Halibut on the Moon is general knowledge, but I knew it going in, and there are clues in the narrative itself, and as knowing it definitely affected my “enjoyment” level, I’m going to save all spoilers for my second paragraph; forewarned. This is my second David Vann novel (after the wildly transgressive Dirt), and it is so different from that previous read as to feel like it’s from a different author. Certainly well written and emotionally affecting, I couldn’t help but be distracted by the backstory, and despite appreciating what Vann was going for here, I simply couldn’t surrender myself to the experience. Rounding up to four stars because this is well written and because I’d feel like a jerk giving anything less.
The bare light bulb humming, another torture, moth wings fusing to its surface. Too many things. Rhoda, the IRS, his divorces, the sinus pain, his job, the empty new house, winter, this trip that has not made things better at all. He was making it through the weeks until this trip, a kind of finish line, but now he can see all the weeks waiting after it, and no change, no improvement. The doctor was supposed to help. And Rhoda, and his family, seeing his kids, getting away from winter and loneliness and insomnia and work, but it’s no easier here. He’s no closer to seeing a way through. How to stay alive long enough to where life becomes something wanted again.
Spoiler(ish) time: I knew going in that this is a novelisation of Vann’s father as he struggled with bipolar disorder and suicidal thoughts (and if one doesn’t know that beforehand, the main character refers to his son as David Vann). In the storyline, Jim has flown from his home in Fairbanks to visit with his family in California, all of whom know that Jim is struggling physically, mentally, and financially, and they’re all hoping to intervene in his dark plans. Vann does a wonderful job of capturing Jim’s mental struggles — of capturing the swings from mania to depression; of giving a voice to an intelligent, well-spoken man who honestly can’t think of a reason to keep living in unrelenting pain — but I was never unaware that this was an author trying to get into his own father’s head. When there was a scene that involved both Jim and young David, I’d be thinking, “Did he really see his dad running on all fours like a werewolf in the mud as he chased an old man complaining about them trespassing on his land?” When there was a scene with Jim and his brother Gary, or with their elderly parents, as Jim tried to suggest that his childhood set him up for self-loathing, I wondered, “Is this an actual encounter that was shared with the author?” When there are countless scenes of Jim trying to feel something real with porn or prostitutes, I had to wonder, again, if these were actual events shared with Vann or flights of imagination (and which is the more unsettling option?) I simply could not surrender to the story and my reading experience suffered for it. Forgive my morbid mind, but the most interesting thing to me was to discover how the author would choose to end his “novel”.
It hits both ends and knows flight, true flight, for the first time. Not restricted by the thickness of water. No resistance. Something no human has ever felt either, and no bird, to fly in an airless place, and without any suit. No barrier. Only the purest flight ever known, pure also because both its eyes are on the top side of its head. Any other fish would see the astronauts below, the lunar module, the surface of the moon, but not the halibut. It sees only emptiness above, undistracted, or maybe it sees Earth, a blue-and-white orb so far away, and knows the ocean is there, Alaskan waters, reaches for home, flops again against nothing to try to propel itself faster. What does a halibut think in that moment of flight? Until we know that, do we know anything?
Again, I appreciate what Vann intended and achieved with Halibut on the Moon, and I wish I could report that I liked it better (it really is a remarkable account of a damaged psyche) and I do look forward to reading Vann again.
