In Deb Olin Unferth’s debut novel Vacation, Meyers, a man with a dented head stalks his wife who is stalking Gray, his old college friend. Meyers goes to Central America in order to confront (and probably kill) Gray, who is dying from a brain tumor he does not know he has. A daughter travels across the country to find her eco-terrorist father, who stages a media spectacle on a ship during a hurricane, a ship that Meyers will leap into. Unferth’s novel is propelled by a sort of dream logic. Characters are pulled across vast stretches of time or space by forces they barely understand or care to understand. Plans unravel, limbs are broken, people disappear, but everyone ends up where they should be, if not where they intended to be.

The novel begins with Meyers, an “outlaw, husband, hero, vacationer,” taking a trip to Syracuse to kill Gray, whom Meyers believes once had an affair with his wife, herself never named. When people begin to ask Meyers about his apparent disappearance, he replies that he is on vacation. Outside of Gray’s house, a taxi driver asks Meyers what he is doing in Syracuse. “Oh, the usual,” he replies, “vacation, fleeing the cubicle, you know.” The taxi driver is unimpressed. “Odd spot for a holiday,” he says. When Meyers tells his boss that he has been missing work to vacation in Syracuse, his boss tells him “That’s no vacation. That’s a smudge.” Characters consistently question what constitutes a vacation, and they encourage us to do the same. Appropriately, Vacation is very concerned with what it means to be on vacation. Everyone tells Meyers that Syracuse is not a vacation because it is physically unsuitable — it lacks the exoticism and distance that sometimes define the Nicaraguan adventure that follows — but it feels these characters are missing a vital point. Because we have access to Meyers thoughts, we know that the vacation is merely a cover for his plan to kill Gray. The vacation explanation feels unsuitable because we recognize that is in fact all business.

The same can be said of the subsequent trip to Nicaragua. Though Nicaragua appears to fit all the criteria for a vacation that Syracuse does not, the novel’s major characters are drawn to Central America because they are trying to escape something, but because they are trying to find something. Meyers comes searching for Gray; later, his wife comes searching for him. The “untrainer” comes to release another dolphin. Gray is the notable exception. His wanderings appear to be without drive or direction. His rapidly expanding brain tumor only makes his occasional message more confounding, and it becomes apparent that even Gray feels lost both inside and outside of his mind: “I’m in some kind of overgrown maze, his last message reads, enemy planes above. But you can get in on the highway and lead me out.” He is the wild goose that lends much of the novel a wild, picaresque quality, dragging characters across two continents, an earthquake and a hurricane, and through chance encounters that might only appear connected to the reader removed from all of it.

The same freewheeling sensibility applies to much of Unferth’s narration. The narrative itself is a patchwork of objective description, fantasy, and free, indirect style. It is no surprise that Vacation comes from Dave Eggers’s publishing house. Unferth’s novel is as concerned with its style and structure as it is with its story, often to its detriment. At one point we are presented with “an index of all the words [Meyers] had read aloud to [his wife] from letters, books, menus during their year of courtship and nearly three years of marriage.” The narrator’s voice is as self-conscious and insecure as any in its story. Often the narrator engages in a question and answer format with herself in order to reveal additional information. The attempt is intriguing and often succeeds, but what means to come off as disarmingly sincere in its insecurity sometimes becomes a frustrating diversion. Near the end of the novel, the narrator tries to settle the vacation question, but even she cannot come up with a wholly satisfying answer:

A vacation is simply, you know, to vacate. The vacationer leaves the home (leaves the mind), leaves the home empty (except for what he left behind (her)), that’s all.
No, no that’s not a vacation, if you simply move to a different spot. That’s just looking at stuff, familiar stuff.
What’s so familiar about this? Meyers would certainly like to know.

Syracuse and Nicaragua are certainly vacations of space. But even the narrator recognizes that these are “simply [moves] to a different spot,” distinct from vacations which “leave the mind.” We come to realize that an interesting reversal is taking place. When Meyers is in Syracuse and Nicaragua, he moves with a purpose. His quest to find and kill Gray defines his existence, and when Gray’s brain tumor finally overtakes him, though Meyers does not know it, we recognize that he too is not long for this world. Compare this to the aimlessness of the New York City that is the vacated home. We see the city as an impressionistic blur. In the city, everyone looks like everyone else. Meyers, his wife, and Gray all disappear in crowds of people “much like himself and herself in suit get-ups and in various conversational postures.” The city, which we expect to be a hub of activity and diversity, is revealed to be a mass of identical people filling in every opening, getting “around each other and into the space between them.”

In a way, New York is depicted with more fantasy than Nicaragua. Meyers, his wife, and Gray are all said to be people with office jobs, but they never appear obligated to go to them. Interestingly, Meyers’ job only becomes important when he goes on vacation, and the novel enters a more realistic mode where not going to work provokes the very real consequence of termination. The city appears to be in a constant state of flux, detached from space or time. Characters spend their days following one another through the mass of people who do not appear to be going anywhere else. Gray is the appropriate name for the object of pursuit in the city. Neither black nor white, he is externally indistinguishable from the people, the concrete of the ground, or the buildings themselves. When Meyers tries to imagine Gray, he cannot lock him into a specific appearance or action, “[he] might be standing on linoleum or carpet … or he might not be standing. He might be standing next to a table, sitting at it … Who could even imagine all the places Gray might be right now?” This following is the vacation of the mind that the narrator hints at. Meyers and his wife follow in order to distract themselves from their disintegrating home life. It is only appropriate then, that the depiction of this mental vacation would focus on impressions rather than concrete details. When the physical vacation begins, the mental vacation ends.

However, the end of the mental vacation does not mean an end to fantasy. Often the narrator appears to inhabit the characters’ voices, and in doing so moves beyond free, indirect style and into something resembling ventriloquism. The narrator’s intrusion becomes particularly apparent in the characters’ frequent email correspondences: “I’m shoving your desk over a cliff in the morning,” writes Meyers’s regional manager, “I’ll watch it smash on the rocks below.” These correspondences play an increasingly important role as the novel goes on. At some point Meyers loses the ability to communicate via email, The messages, however, keep coming. We begin to wonder who is fantasizing these conversations: Meyers? Gray? The narrator? Unferth’s elaborate style is at times seductive, but its constant games make us suspicious of whose voice, whose story we are reading, and at these moments we disengage with the characters we are meant to empathize with. At the same time, the narrator frequently threatens to puncture her own meticulously constructed fantasy with the voices of outsiders. These additional voices, always from characters in the background, provide a confidence and grounding in realism that the narrator struggles to find. They are a testament to Unferth’s ability to create a cast of distinct and convincing voices. These external perspectives cut through the narrator’s fantasy. Maria’s description of Gray’s final days makes Gray into a sympathetic character rather than a mere engine for Meyers’s misadventures. At the same time, they make us lose patience with the narrator’s stylistic loop de loops.

It is only when their mental vacations and the narrator’s games end that the characters of the novel are able to take action and become something other than pieces of driftwood strung together and carried by an unpredictable current. These actions are often too little, too late: Meyers’s wife leaves to find her husband but arrives only after he has left on his fatal boat ride. “She knew this was her chance to go after something at last,” the narrator tells us, “And it wasn’t the perfect thing … at least it was an attempt.” Similarly, the narrator is very insistent that Meyers does not fall out of the boat or that he was merely “going out after the dolphin.” Rather, his suicide is his own choice. It is his decision to stop following. The decision may not make him a complete character in our eyes, after the story’s obfuscation and cacophony, but it is a move in the right direction.

Justin Keenan ‘10 cuts through fantasy with a gas-powered hedge trimmer.