I got a third of the way into Legend of a Suicide before I realised it isn’t a novel but a collection of 5 interconnected short stories and a novella. The ‘story’ as such, is centred around the life of Roy Fenn and it relates how his father’s suicide affected him in childhood and later life. The shifting point of view is key, I think, to getting to grips with the narrative.

Beginning in the first person we get Roy’s perspective. Within the first tale he tells us the details of his life: how, when and where he was born, about his parent’s unhappy marriage and divorce and his father’s suicide and its aftermath. Subsequent stories fill in more details, moving both backwards and forwards in time and shifting between registers with alarming ease. It’s simultaneously funny and tragic, shocking and poignant.

In the novella, the viewpoint moves to third person. It’s a significant change. Vann plays with our readerly expectations and packs quite surprising punch at its conclusion.

The book is dedicated to Vann’s own father, who, it turns out, committed suicide. The short bio note at the end tells us that, like Roy Fenn, Vann ‘was born on Adak Island, Alaska and spent his childhood in Ketchikan.’ Legend of a Suicide is a work of fiction, but it's also true or as true as the fictions we tell ourselves. It's a fabrication woven out of the facts of Vann’s life. Postmodernists will have it that the author is dead – the text is king and nothing else matters. Here, though, it’s hard to separate out the author from his fiction. Vann knows this, of course, and toys with the reader.

An important book.