I recently finished Aquarium
, a novel by David Vann that has gotten good reviews. *** spoiler alert ***
The book has a realistic style but is set in an alternative version of the U.S. in which there is no welfare system. Thus when a teenage girl’s mother gets sick and the father abandons the family there is no Medicaid to provide a nurse for the dying mother; the teenage girl has to function as the nurse for several years and then, since there is also no financial aid for low-income college students, cannot go to college after the mother dies. (Nor in this alternative version of the world are there any of the community organizations that existing prior to the Welfare State, or even just neighbors helping neighbors. If the father leaves and mom is sick the entire burden falls on the 14-year-old girl.)
The book takes place about twenty years later. The teenage girl has grown up to become a single mother. As there is no welfare system in this version of the U.S. she doesn’t receive any assistance from the government nor does she get any child support from the father of her own daughter. (The book is set in Seattle, which, as explained in the relevant chapter of Real World Divorce, is a bad place for an adult hoping to live off a child; practical maximum child support revenue is about $20,000 per year per child.)
Life is not comfortable:
My mother drove an old Thunderbird. Apparently she had imagined a freer life before I came along. The front hood was half the length of the car. An enormous engine that galloped high and low at the curb. It could die at any moment, but it was going to finish off all the gas in the world first.
We lived in a shitty place. A shack on the highway, water dripping through the ceiling. I’m not going to say more. But next door, sharing the same dirt, we had a family from Japan. Asians are supposed to be rich, but these ones weren’t. I don’t know what went wrong. But the man dug a pit, and we thought he was going to roast a pig. We thought he might be Hawaiian. But he lined it with plastic and rocks and some plants and made a pond, and had four koi carps in there. That sounds nice, Steve said. A pearl in a toilet, my mother said. One of the koi was orange and white, the colors swirled together, and I named her Angel. And the man put an old wooden chair beside the pond so that I could sit. He never used it. He always stood. But he left this chair for me.
Everything bad in this world comes from men, my mother said. You have to know that. All violence, all fear, all slavery. Everything that crushes us.
Author Nell Zink said, “I thought what people like is race and gender—I’m gonna give them race and gender! I’m gonna give them race and gender until their heads spin!” and apparently Mr. Vann agrees. The 12-year-old protagonist is a lesbian and the reaction to this fact by other characters is either immediate 100% condemnation or immediately 100% acceptance. The girl’s 12-year-old lover is an Indian-American schoolmate from a successful family. It is never explained why the parents of the Indian girl allow their daughter to sleep over at the house of a single mother.
The action of the book comes from the grandfather trying to integrate himself into his daughter’s and granddaughter’s lives. Consistent with our “everyone can be a victim” culture, it turns out that the grandfather abandoned his wife due to PTSD from serving in the U.S. military. Now he is magically all better but his daughter won’t forgive him. Maybe it was the therapy industry that healed him because he suggests to his daughter that if she becomes a therapy industry customer she will discard 20 years of anger.
I was impressed with the writing style but a lot of the plot elements seemed unmotivated. What do readers think who read the book?
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