Vacation

By Deb Olin Unferth

An “enthralling headscratcher of a first novel . . . weaves an intricate tale of quests and escapes” as a man follows his wife who follows a mysterious stranger (Publishers Weekly).
 
Deb Olin Unferth’s award-winning debut novel is “an off-kilter ode to obsession” with a “richly textured, often surprising linguistic landscape” (The Rumpus). In it, a man named Myers has noticed that his wife has suddenly become suspiciously absent in the evenings. He decides to start following her on her evening escapades, hoping to discover her betrayal. Instead, he soon discovers she is following a man named Gray, who happens to be a former classmate of Myers, and whose own marriage is falling apart.
 
What follows is an unusual, unsettling, and wildly entertaining novel by the acclaimed author of Minor Robberies. With deadpan humor and skewed wordplay, Deb Olin Unferth weaves a mystery of hope and heartbreak.
 
Winner of the Cabell First Novel Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9780802197870

Book preview

vacation_cover.jpec.jpg

In this enthralling headscratcher of a first novel, Unferth weaves an intricate tale of quests and escapes, of leaving and following. —Publishers Weekly

Deb Olin Unferth is, I believe, one of the crucial literary artists of her generation. Her vision evokes high comedy and the violence of tragedy heard through voices exquisitely particular to her mind.

—Diane Williams, author of It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature

Unferth is always playing a sort of life-or-death word game. She will seize a word and wring all meanings from it, like a terrier worrying a bone . . . in their very abstraction the descriptions can be truly poignant.

—Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Book Review

Told in a lean voice that feels completely new, you’ll be pleased to discover that it’s all quite funny, too.

—Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Sentence by sentence, Unferth surprises and makes profound sense of what it is to be alive. Loud applause should follow this accomplished—entertaining, funny, sad, solemn—book. —Christine Schutt, author of Florida

"For most people, traveling is supposed to be a time of personal rejuvenation and general R&R—a period when you shouldn’t have to do anything more strenuous than order a frozen margarita. Deb Olin Unferth’s inventive debut novel, Vacation, turns that idea on its head. Her characters might visit foreign beaches and linger in Internet cafes, but they are primarily careening into existential crisis . . . her book excels at exploring the remote reaches of her characters’ psyches."

— Time Out New York

"Unferth’s sentences are dazzling . . . But Vacation’s trickiest trick is cartwheeling along the border between the simplicity of allegory and the complexity of true human frailty. Makes you love these characters, too." —Philadelphia City Paper

"[Vacation] showcases Unferth’s unbridled gift for inspired narrative wordplay."

—Elle

The quirky, metafictional gloom is part of the charm of this novel and is a critical gear in the apparatus that propels it to its lonely conclusion in a far-flung corner of the earth. —Bookforum

"Vacation is fantastic . . . Funny, bleak, often brilliant, Vacation once again proves that Unferth can perform a linguistic high-wire act all her own." —Esquire

"Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth’s dreamy, surreal debut novel, reads like an extended hallucination or out-of-body experience, as unsettling as it is compelling."

—The Village Voice

Unferth skillfully layers what for another writer might be throwaway details into a gripping psychological adventure, and the persistence of her writing turns a rather abstract work . . . from a postmodern anti-narrative into prose that grips the reader like a Jane Austen novel. —Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Fans of Dave Eggers’s ever estimable literary concern McSweeney’s are finally catching onto what fans of Diane Williams’s unsung journal NOON have been savoring for years: the tidy, tuneful uncertainties that weave to form the fictions of Deb Olin Unferth." —Boston Phoenix

The genius of this sad, poignant, and hilarious book is its capacity to demonstrate how hollow our destinations can be, while simultaneously showing how much fun can be had in the going. —American Book Review

"A lyrical web of vignettes, letters, e-mails and confessions told from multiple points of view, Vacation threads the themes of loss, travel, escape, revenge, abandonment, disillusionment, fathers, daughters and betrayal." —Richmond Style Weekly

At the heart of Deb Olin Unferth’s astonishing, unsettling first novel is the idea and intention of vacation: What do we escape from? Where do we go?

—Rain Taxi

Unferth is a hero . . . She has shown up early to the party with a book’s worth of undeniably unique prose. All there is left to do is to sit back and wait for the imitators. —Splice Today

"Vacation is a remarkable and ambitious must-read, and Unferth herself an exciting writer to keep watch on. Without a doubt, there are more great things still to come." —New Pages

"It is a formidable task to produce work that asks ‘the big questions’ in a way that does justice to the enormity of those questions . . . Unferth’s imaginative, fractured, uncompromising Vacation is urgently contemporary without failing to strike at the heart of the most enduring human concerns." —Rumpus

Vacation

Vacation

deb olin unferth

McSWEENEY’S

Grove Press

Copyright © 2008, 2010 by Deb Olin Unferth

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [e-mail].

First published in 2008 by McSweeney’s Books, San Francisco

Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4472-0

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

10 11 12 13 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of John Kenneth Unferth (1965–2004)

Chapter One

CLAIRE

I recall only one sentence that she said. She said it all the time. Every day was an occasion. If she had to be away on a shoot, she said it to my father. If I had to take cough syrup, she said it to me. She said it to the family dog before his operation. It was her wisdom. She said it with pride. What my mother said was: You won’t even feel it.

I was born in the city. My father was a bank man, my mother starred in soaps. We lived like the famous in a house by the park and I woke to a vase of fresh tulips each day. We had long hallways and long tablecloths. My mother had rooms full of clothes. So many strangers gave us presents that we had a man to pen our thank-yous. Photographers slept outside the house.

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. We sold the house and moved into a smaller house and then into a large rented apartment, then into a smaller one. We moved around the city, fitting into smaller and smaller spaces, each time carrying our valuables up and down stairways—the chests, the paintings, the family china, the sofas, the wardrobes. We finally landed in the smallest studio with the dog and our little cat and all of our furniture and light fixtures and jewelry. We laid out the expensive rugs one on top of another on the floor. We hung the paintings floor to low ceiling. It was in this room that my father became sick and couldn’t work. We sold our things off one by one, peeled up a rug or took down a picture, and in this way we paid the medical bills and the other bills and we lived, somewhat. When the floor and walls were bare and the room was mostly cleared out, my father had one more thing to tell me. Early in our marriage, he said, your mother ran off with someone else and she came back pregnant. You are not my daughter.

I felt that too.

I was sixteen that year.

Today I thought about the man who raised me because of a man who 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 to myself on my seat. We regarded one another.

Later I woke to an empty seat beside me and we pulled into the Syracuse depot. I looked out the window at the few frail people waiting for a train the other way, a strip of woman and her tiny, mittened girl. Suitcases on the bench. And there, I saw him, the man with the head. He’d gotten off the train. He was standing flush-faced in the chill, his suitcase on the platform, his hat crushed in his hand like a wad of paper, the other hand curled around the handle of a briefcase. A businessman. A man with a two-week vacation that he gets no matter what. If he dies and hasn’t used his two weeks, they wrench open his coffin and put the money inside.

But who would want to waste a vacation on a place like that, a town so cold and so small, jammed into the countryside like a sliver? Part of a train ticket, an extra included in the fare, is that they’ll move you even if you don’t know where you are or how to get anywhere. If you are too exhausted or brainless, if your brain has been killed off and destroyed, if you are dead, they will still transport you, as long as your ticket has not expired. That’s how that man looked at that moment with the splinter of Syracuse stuck in his head. He looked a little like the man I had called father most of my life—not the head, my father’s was a perfect egg, but because he had the same false energy of someone who does not yet know they are down for the count. Then the train was pulling out. He followed it, first with his eyes, then with his body, turning as it went.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see him left behind.

Chapter Two

The train pulled away. Myers walked the length of the platform.

He took a cab to Gray’s neighborhood, lines of identical houses in rows, different from each other only in superficial ways—the size of the chimney or placement of the porch—or in meeker assertions, a mailbox that looked like a reindeer, a soggy doll fastened to a swing. Evidence of thoughtless, pleasureless lives.

The taxi pulled up to Gray’s house. It was set back from the street and it sunk into the coming darkness. Shut blinds, an empty driveway, an unmowed lawn. The cabman put the car in park, swiped the meter. Myers stayed where he was.

They don’t just spill onto the sidewalk, my friend, the cabman said. You go up and ring the bell. Ding dong.

Myers got out and ran up. It was raining here too and water went down his face. He rang and waited. No one came to the door. He flipped the mailbox. A full run of mail, side-stacked, stuffed. He rang again. He opened the screen and knocked. An ineffectual thud on solid wood. The house was the muted color of a people dominated by the landscape, people who just want to get something down that won’t blow away. He knocked again, rapped on the diamond window. Through it, dark shapes, stillness. So Gray wasn’t home yet. Okay. He grasped the doorknob, turned it (why not? the fucker), shook it. It was locked. He looked at his watch. Now what.

Under his feet the word welcome had its say.

He ran back to the taxi.

Where’d you come in from? asked the cabman, turning the meter back on, putting the car in park. Myers told him (wearily) and the cabman said he’d been there, damn fine locale, a bit busy, you know what, they put their garbage on the sidewalks and there’s traffic, crime, parking’s impossible, but nice spot. Then the cabman told him where he, the cabman, was from and also told him where his parents were from and where their parents were from and his wife’s parents too, both sides and the sides before that. Then he went on to tell him about his daughter—age, eye color, favorite book this week, favorite book last week—then about his wife and the wife before this one, which one was better, in what ways. Then about the circles he drove in each day and what changes he noticed in them, in the cement and the paint and the people, the spread of Syracuse, the flat of it, all this and more, and how long did Myers want to wait?

Hi Gray, he was going to say. Thought I’d just drop in, see what you had going on here. Check in on the nearby alumni, sort of knock around. I see the kitchen could use a coat of paint. Maybe some new cabinets. Somebody should take apart that foosball table. How about if I give you a hand? Whatever’s needed, whatever minor chore stands undone. Here, why don’t you get up on this ladder, Gray, check the gutter—careful! Oh, oops. Hand me that hammer, would you? That saw? That power drill? Lean over this way a little. I can’t seem to get your eye from this angle.

Small satisfactions awaited him on the other side of these moments.

Was Gray a fix-it man? Did he own a foosball table? A ladder?

When Myers thought about it, he didn’t know anything about the guy.

Outside, twig trees, half-empty, dim in last daylight, the day moving to night. A scratch of naked bushes. Inside, the cabman talked on and on, now about a radio he’d bought, now a trapeze artist he’d known, the three-finger waltz he’d learned from his ma, a knife he’d found on the backseat one day, not sharp enough to hurt anyone, a carving knife, like for clay, you understand, for reducing the size of sculptures, for making objects smaller, slowly.

Guy’s not coming, he got around to saying at last.

He’ll be here.

Meter’s running.

I can see that.

He had to be around here somewhere. He still had his usual teaching schedule, four four, comp, business writing, a mild commute. Last time Myers had called (and hung up), Gray had still answered in his despondent voice at both phones—home and office—and there was no sign of anyone picking up and taking off midsemester. That much Myers felt certain of.

What’s that you say? You don’t know what this is about? Maybe a little drill in the earhole will jog your memory. Maybe a little claw of the old clawhammer to the knee. Maybe some takeout, as in, let’s take this outside. As in, let’s take your fingers outside, one by one, toss them out the window. Then let’s see what you know and don’t.

Small satisfactions and, who knows, maybe big ones too.

An hour was going by and then had gone by and another was beginning. Around them, the citizens of Syracuse were dragging themselves home from another day on the make. One got into a sport-utility vehicle two driveways down, his swollen body stuffed inside a coat and slouched under an umbrella. Myers himself was plumped under his own layers of cloth and plastic-based materials.

So what shot you off to Syracuse? the cabman was saying now.

Oh, the usual—vacation, fleeing the cubicle, you know, Myers said.

Odd spot for a holiday.

Friend of the wife.

I don’t see a wife anywhere.

She’s coming later.

The cabman seemed to have chatted himself out. Seemed ready for an explanation from the backseat, by God. He glanced back at Myers. The cabman, fore-armed, seamannish, ex-army. Myers was beginning to despise him.

How much longer you want to wait?

Give him a little, said Myers. Eye on the front door, the driveway, the walk.

I’m turning off the engine.

Leave it on. It’s cold out.

He shut it off.

Hello Gray, good to see you. It’s Myers. So you’re still living alone, I see. Gained a few pounds, put on a few years, lost a hair or two, huh, pal? We sat in the same room for fourteen weeks running once. We gazed at numbers on a board. We bubbled in our Scantron sheets, put down our pencils when done. I suspect your grades were as middling as mine. Maybe worse—you’re dumber. Remember the macaroni, the buttered toast? The jello salad? That’s right, we ate food that came out of the same troughs. I missed my chance to gut you right then.

He had memories of Gray from college days. Gray had appeared some sophomore year and sat in the cafeteria with a backpack. He rifled through papers, scribbled, dog-eared, lined up his bottles of soda. After that he mostly vanished into the public transportation system—Myers recalled a glimpse of him leaning around the bus stop. Myers could remember no award of any sort being given the man. No sailing trophy, no honor roll, no debate club. No special interests, no reading Mein Kampf on the quad or passing out religious pamphlets, no part in any play.

What happened to your head anyway? said the cabman.

My head? Myers wiped his nose. Oh, I think I’m coming down with a cold.

Uh-huh.

Gray (he’d say, putting down his briefcase, propping an arm on the doorframe), I rode all the way from New York today. I had the worst day of my life. Six hours on a train will do things to a man. I feel like I’ve got a broken hip now. I feel like I’ve got a broken neck. And I’m tacked to all this suitcase crap. I have to tell you, Gray, for your sake I wish I had a broken neck, I really do. A man with a broken neck knows the thing is over. His enemies are safe. The way it stands now—I hate to say it—for you, it’s not looking good.

The crew cut, the hard face, the cabman. I’m off soon, he said.

Myers could jimmy the door. After all,

Reviews for Vacation

[tibobi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Short of It: Beautiful, rhythmic prose that begs to be read aloud. Vacation is a treat for the brain that’s gone soft (mine). The Rest of It: You know how you feel after missing the gym for say a month…or maybe even two months? You feel sort of sloggy and wonky and a bit out of sorts? Well, I’ve been feeling that way lately with my reading. Not saying that I didn’t enjoy the books, quite the opposite, but my brain needed a bit of stimulation. Something different to get the brainwaves firing again. Vacation did just that. Myers and his wife have lived a decent life, but one night, Myers notices that his wife has gone missing. Turns out, that every evening around the same time, she becomes “absent.” She tells Myers that she needs to work late, but what he finds out, is that she spends her evenings following Gray, an old classmate of his. Myers immediately thinks the worst. In flashbacks we see how it used to be between them: "She had touched his face when he was tired, when he had another bad day at the office. He remembered that, the way she used to do that, the way she expected nothing back, it was gentle. As nice as rain." (31)Myers, determined to get even, decides to follow Gray as he treks across the world, but has this to say about his wife before he goes: "She had arrived as one thing, and now, as he parted, she was another, some strange folded-up broken thing—and at last he had done nothing to stop it and at the most he had caused it all." (31)What Myers doesn’t know is that his wife (who goes through the story without a name) has no idea who Gray is, and Gray has no idea who she is. They are complete strangers to one another. Myers decides to find Gray, who has left the country. He sends him friendly emails and the two get to know one another again. They decide to meet on Corn Island, so Myers packs his things and takes a “vacation.” What Myers doesn’t know is that Gray is suffering from an inoperable brain tumor and has no idea where he is. So as Myers corresponds with Gray via email, the quest to find Gray becomes a bit of a joke. Additionally, Gray’s ex-wife is also looking for him and Gray’s daughter, who is really not his daughter, decides to seek out her true father who happens to be a dolphin un-trainer. Wild, eh? This book is a roller-coaster of a ride. It takes you from one side of the world to another. There are natural disasters to contend with, dolphin rescues taking place, men struggling to find out who they really are, weird, island folk and cabbies with personality. It’s sounds like an awful lot to contend with, and it is, but it makes for one, satisfying read.

[devdev365 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The novel offers that incredibly satisfying form of narrative arc in which characters' paths converge and diverge in unexpected ways, here across a thematically unified landscape of isolation, of "following from a distance," of wilderness. Meditative yet punchy prose explores the depressions and strange drives of stranded individuals. Witty introspective descriptions and dialogue.

[gwendolyndawson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vacation is the hilarious account of a husband on a journey to save his marriage. Myers knows something odd is going on with his wife, and to solve the mystery he's forced to take a vacation to seek answers even though he has no idea what he's looking for or where he's going. In its own distinctive style, Vacation bears witness to a raw and irrepressible human spirit.Unferth is a genius at crafting perfect (and perfectly unusual) sentences. Each page is a treat. This excerpt, in which Myers describes what happens to the accumulated stuff when a couple breaks up, illustrates this story's unique blend of melancholy and humor:"There were also the mirrors, the photos, and other inaccurate reflections. The razor, the bathtub. The kids and the dog, although they had none. The idea of dog, that. The possibility of dog that now would not be possible. Her mother, or her mother's dislike of him, who would get that? Surely that would come with him. Along with the rooster clock that she loved, that he hated, that she bought when she started to hate him."Images of drowning are prevalent throughout Vacation, and Unferth masterfully transforms these desperate images into events of great beauty:"A man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were wrapped in air and light."Unfortunately, the primary story is disrupted by a sideshow involving a daughter seeking her dolphin-trainer father. This subplot is never resolved and becomes an unwanted distraction that should have been deleted during the editing process. Despite this imperfection, Vacation is entirely charming and well worth reading.

[carrieprice78 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is worth a read, if only for an unusual view of humanity. Many people experience it, but fewer people write about it successfully: human nature is a strange thing.Here are several narratives happening at once, and Ms. Unferth craftily slides back and forth between the three--perhaps four?--stories. I found her writing style mildly tiresome after a while, I think because of her blatancy, but I still feel that this book has value as a vignette of the more unusual side of silly humans.

[mlleehreen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Quirky and elegantly written, VACATION is a typical McSweeney’s book. The story is a combination of the banal and the odd; a simple tale of an unraveling marriage that takes a sharp detour into the surreal.

The convoluted plot can be difficult to follow but Unferth’s beautiful prose – by turns bleak, deadpan, haunting and cynical – makes reading a pleasure. Observations like “the house was the muted color of a people dominated by the landscape, people who just wanted to get something down that won’t blow away” or “a man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were trapped in air and light” are examples of Unferths’ writing at its best. But six competing narrative voices and the increasingly improbable progress of the plot can be frustrating.

A short synopsis:

Several years before the start of VACATION, the protagonist Meyers discovers that his wife has developed an obsession with another man, a stranger. She follows this stranger wherever he goes, all the while telling her husband that she’s busy with work. What she doesn’t realize is that Myers spots her lies immediately and begins to follow her while she follows the stranger: and, for many months, that’s how the couple spend their evenings. Myers is unable to confront his wife about her bizarre behavior, and she is unable to admit it.

When the stranger moves away, Myers hopes their marriage will return to normal. But instead, they continue to drift apart. As divorce seems imminent, Myers decides to take revenge on the stranger he blames for the alienation of his wife’s affections. And while his wife has no idea who the man was, by an extraordinary coincidence Myers does: they went to college together, his name is Gray, and they were loosely acquainted.

VACATION opens as Meyers arrives at Gray’s doorstep. He finds the house empty and the mailbox full; his old friend is away. After a short email exchange, Meyers learns that Gray has planned a trip to South America and Meyers arranges to rendezvous with him on Corn Island in Nicaragua. He heads south to the tropics immediately.

It’s very odd that Gray, who hardly knows Meyers, isn’t more alarmed to see this figure from his past pop back into view and invite himself to Nicaragua. Although Gray himself isn’t aware of it, he has a massive brain tumor that has begun to affect his ability to think and act rationally. His doctor has contacted his ex-wife with the news, and she is desperately trying to locate him, but with no success – perhaps because it never occurs to her to send him an email asking what he’s up to.

Meyers is severely injured in an earthquake immediately upon his arrival in Nicaragua. He breaks several ribs and one arm, and has to spend most of his ready cash on hospital bills. Meanwhile, he’s been fired from his job due to his unexplained absence and the news has reached his wife – who, angered by her husband’s erratic behavior, cancels all his credit cards and leaves Meyers without any means to buy a return ticket home.

Completely stranded, Meyers uses the sixty dollars he has left to make his way cross-country to the largely deserted but beautiful Corn Island. Meanwhile, in the brief time Gray’s been gone his illness has escalated dramatically. He tries to make his way to Corn Island, but he dies – delirious and lost in Panama – before he can make it.

Meyers arrives on Corn Island and Gray isn’t there. He realizes that his wife has abandoned him, that he will probably never be able to exact his revenge, that he has no job, and no way to return to the United States. He commits suicide rather than face such a bleak future.

Meyers’ wife, stony-hearted until this point, mysteriously thaws. She knows her husband is headed to Corn Island and decides she’ll meet him there. Of course, she doesn’t arrive until after he’s died. When she asks the locals, they tell her they’ve never seen Meyers – though they all have, and do remember – and so his wife leaves in defeat, none the wiser.