Until now, John Darnielle has been famous for what (undoubtedly inciting the green-eyed monster in many) he terms his "day job" – that of writer, composer, guitarist and vocalist for the band The Mountain Goats – but if his novel Wolf in White Van [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] is a taste of things to come, it looks like, from now on, he's also going to be widely known as an accomplished fiction author, too. And I'm clearly not the only one to have been blown away by this title since it made the longlist for this year's National Book Award in America, sitting alongside long-time literary heavyweights such as Marilynne Robinson and Richard Powers.
The range of Darnielle’s inventiveness is impressive to say the least. His protagonist Sean Phillips ekes out a meagre income from player subscriptions to Trace Italian, “a game of strategy and survival” that Sean invented during the lonely hours he spent in hospital as a teenager following a horrific incident with a gun that leaves him horribly disfigured; his face a “strange and terrible” mess of raw flesh and misshapen bones thereafter. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic America, in which players have to make their way across the central states in search of the Trace Italian – a “shining structure” on the plains of Kansas (named after the star fort or trace italienne Sean learnt about in history lessons at school: a structure comprised of “triangular defensive barricades branching out around all sides of a fort”), “protecting the sprawling self-contained city underneath it”, a refuge from the mutant hominids who roam the irradiated Earth above.
As Darnielle begins his descriptions, it’s easy to visualise detailed images on a computer screen, but Trace Italian exists only in the imagination of Sean and his players – it operates like a classic choose-your-own-adventure story, but played via snail mail: the players choose their next move from the options available at the end of the scene they’ve been sent, and mail their decision to Sean, who then sends back the associated next instalment in the journey, at the end of which, inevitably, is another set of choices; and so on and on.
This idea, that of the direction of the particular path taken having been dictated by a series of choices made, lies at the very heart of the novel. Slowly we trace Sean’s own story back to its origins, linking his past to the present: “The Sean who built the Trace is as distant from me now as the Sean who blew his face off is from both of us. All three live in me, I guess, but those two, and God knows how many others, are like fading scents.”
And along the way we discover just how flimsy the divide that separates fantasy from reality can be. The fact that Sean spends his days cloistered away from the real world is one thing – the extent of his facial disfigurement ensures any interaction with people other than medical professionals is a fraught encounter of embarrassed downcast eyes or unbelieving stares – but then two teenage lovers enact their search for the imagined Trace in the real world and tragedy ensues.
Interestingly, Wolf in White Van is widely being described as Darnielle's debut, but in 2008 he wrote the short novel Black Sabbath: Masters of Reality as part of Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series – a sequence of books specifically about album covers. And given that it told the story of a troubled teenage boy (written in the first person in the form of his diary) in a mental institution, who uses the songs on the album in question to communicate with the world around him, there are definite similarities between Darnielle's two narratives.
That said, Wolf in White Van is without doubt a more mature work, in terms of narrative scope and composition. And barring these minor comparisons, it's unlike anything I've read. Sure, you could sit it on a shelf next to Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin or other troubled-teens stories; or, indeed, one could argue that the origins of the Trace Italian might be found in The Hunger Games or even its predecessor Battle Royale, but Darnielle spins together these different threads to make something entirely new – a story about isolation, escape and the power of the imagination, written in haunting prose which hums with an unsettling but beautiful melody all of its own.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
