The word mesmerize is an eponym; the root of the word started simply as a guy’s last name. Franz Mesmer was a precursor to the art/skill/whatever that would later be called hypnotism, and his name eventually lent itself to the world of adjectives. It’s worth bearing in mind—both the story of the word’s root and the word itself—when considering the absolutely incredible debut novel by Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation, published by McSweeney’s. Certainly there are hundreds of books each year published that are labeled “mesmerizing” by someone or other; Deb Olin Unferth’s book not only is mesmerizing, but her writing, her witchily clear and strange and startling sentences, almost demand that her name be adjectivized as well. Reading Vacation, you will be Unferthed.

Vacation begins with a two and a half page account, by a woman named Claire, about her mother and father, but that thread’s quickly put aside as the novel’s driving plot unfolds. There’s a man named Myers, his head strangely shaped from a childhood injury, married to a woman whose name we never discover. Myers has been following his wife as of late, and has discovered, through following her, that she is following someone else, a man named Gray, an acquaintance of Myers’ from college. The story opens with Myers going to Syracuse to confront Gray, presuming that something must be going on with Gray and Myers’ wife if she’s following him around the city like he knows she is (a fact she won’t admit, and a fact he doesn’t, until halfway through the book, confront her about). If the plot sounds even remotely convoluted or awkward or anything, it’s not: it’s maybe simpler to say that Vacation is the story of one man moving, a woman following him, and a man following that woman. 

Yet through what sounds like a pretty simple plot, Unferth is able to create (she may even be said to weave, a word that usually makes me squirm when used for anything other than the verb for how to make a rug) a story of almost shocking resonance and depth. Simple questions that might occur to you to ask a friend if he came to you and said he was following his wife, who was following a recognizable acquaintance: why not ask your wife what she’s doing? What is it you wish to ‘discover’ instead of simply ‘know?’ Doesn’t simple curiosity become something larger, danger, more strange, when it becomes a search? And the real question: what is it you hope to find?

I have no friend who follow wives who are following acquaintances. I’d like to think if I did, I’d ask those questions above. However, Myers’ need to dis- and uncover the details of what he presumes to be some infidelity reveal the far scarier, much simpler, darker workings of most of our hearts: the need to make sense of what we don’t understand, the need to make meaning. Given details, we craft narrative—true or false, impossible or simple. Vacation is, in I think profound ways, the story of a narrative being first constructed and then dismantled.

Claire, for the record, returns to the novel and plays a sort of shadow role to Myers’ wife (or maybe not: maybe that’s me making a narrative out of detail). Myers, his wife, and Gray are not alone, either: from Syracuse to Nicaragua to Panama, the reader meets a handful of other, seemingly ancillary (but never insignificant) characters. Too, it’s worth noting that there’s an active narrator somewhere in this book, and if that sounds bizarre, I urge you to pick up a copy and notice the structure: most chunks of text come in (at most) a handful of paragraphs, and different voices and points of view jump in and out of the way, fluid as athletes. There’s some narrator; not only, in fact, is there some narrator, but a narrator who seems in dialogue with another narrator, or perhaps only in dialogue with itself. It looks silly and dumb written out like what: what it feels like when you come across it is like you’ve found a friend on the inside. It’s a startling, gutsy, great move on Deb Olin Unferth’s part.

Okay, so: despite all the various trickery and wild fun the plot and characters offer the reader, the reason Unferth deserves her own adjective is because of her sentences. I’m opening at random:

 

“Hello, elevate! Unless he wanted to lose the thing!

He propped his arm against the wall.” (p.140)

 

“In an earthquake, if trapped, the experts advise, do not light a match, do not move or kick, do not shout. Use a whistle or tap on a pipe.

Yes, one should always carry a whistle in earthquake country because you might be crushed under a building and not able to holler for help but only able to breathe lightly into your whistle. Or you might be buried alive under the bricks and have just enough air to toot, while your voice, should you have the strength to scream, is absorbed into the dust and paint. Or you might be flung far from civilization and have two broken feet so you can’t walk back and two broken arms so you can’t drag yourself over the dirt but you do have this handy whistle which, if you are too far to be heard or rescued, can be used as solo entertainment while you wait to slowly die.” (p.90)

 

“The next time, he was there and he followed. She went off. The background blurred in his eye. She stopped, sat on a bench on the loudest corner the earth had ever known. A catastrophe of buses and drillings, the dash of the taxi, the rush and half, the tamping down of the cement, the suck of air in, the press of it out, the slow sink of the city, the spread of tar, the lifting of it, the footsteps going through, the out and out of breaths. He watched. In front of him two children knocked around a construction cone.

Who the hell did she think she was, sitting there like that?” (p.36).

 

No joke, at random, those three passages; any page in this book has at least equal treasures awaiting. They conveniently, too, highlight some of the things Unferth does better than almost anybody I know of: she’s fucking hysterically funny (figure 1); her sentences seem to follow the contour of a mind in the process of thinking (figure 2); she can put together prettier phrases and sentences and jamb them into this jumbo sentence rich with muscle and gut and feeling and startling beauty (seriously: a catastrophe of buses and drillings? Fucking hell: it makes me want to give up writing).

 

This is Deb Olin Unferth’s second book (both, by the way, from McSweeney’s, and let’s just acknowledge that McSweeney’s is no longer something exclusively for hipsters, nor some stone on which bitter, angry critics can grind themselves for being insular or exclusive: these people have now published two of the most audaciously great books of fiction (Sal Plascencia’s People of Paper and Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation)(to say absolutely nothing of the great stuff they’ve been publishing in the journal, the best most recently being, from issue 23, Clancy Martin and Caren Beilin, and if you don’t have 23, seriously, buy it)). Again: this is Deb Olin Unferth’s second book. It’s an astonishing book for any author, at any point in her/his career. Here’s a guess: Unferth will be one of a small group of authors who will likely dictate not the direction fiction may go in the coming decades, but the shape and scope fiction may take. Whatever pessimism you harbor, bring that fact to bear on it and I promise you’ll feel better. Write Deb Olin Unferth, write McSweeney’s, write everyone: tell everyone to read the book. And, of course, as soon as possible, read the book.