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266 pages, Hardcover
First published March 3, 2015
Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that’s the world we know forever after. It’s the only world. We can’t see what it might have looked like otherwise.I have no idea how hard my parents’ lives were as kids. By the time I had gained enough self-awareness to seriously wonder, too far into adulthood, they were gone. It must have been a bitch though, for both of them. Mom was the oldest of four when her father took off. My preemie father’s mother died in childbirth or soon after. His father dumped him off to be raised by relations. History is the connective tissue, the tendons, ligaments, and cartilage that joins generations. But connective tissue can get inflamed, making those connections sources of pain instead of strength and flexibility. I know mine has endured its share of soreness. In David Vann’s latest novel, Aquarium, twelve-year-old Caitlin Thompson has discovered a particularly vulnerable familial connection and, unknowingly, has worked it sufficient to make her mother cry uncle.
We know fish are always on guard, hiding at the mouth of a cave or in seaweed or clung to coral, trying to look invisible. Their ends could come from anywhere, at any time, a lager mouth out of the dark and all instantly gone. But aren’t we the same? A car accident at any moment, a heart attack, disease, one of those containers coming loose and falling through the sky, my mother below not even looking up, seeing and feeling nothing, just the end.Cheery kid, ain’t she? Her single mother, Sheri, works at the docks in a dead-end job. They scrape by, but barely, living in a low-rent box of an apartment near Boeing Field, an airport from which many test flights begin. During her aquarium time, Caitlin is befriended by an elderly man who seems as interested in the fish as she. The friendship results in a major family revelation that rocks her world and almost swamps her mother’s.
The book was inspired long ago by a visit to the Seattle Aquarium, when I read the descriptions of the fish at each tank. Those descriptions seemed to me a kind of poetry of human behavior told through the oddity of fish.Hah! So there is an answer! The central image of the aquarium as reflective of life is a strong one, and is used generously throughout the book. There were some times when I had the feeling that Vann was conducting a class, showing his pupils how images are found and applied to human experience and to story writing. You do not have to do much diving to turn up imagery here. Vann has left it all floating at the surface for you to see. Turns out this was by design.
I want a reader to see what happens, how meaning is created in a book…In a 2013 interview with Kevin Breathnach of Totally Dublin, Vann said:
All my fiction until now has been an attempt to set a bonfire to my family’s past, to burn away all my family’s shame and tragedy and failure. Goat Mountain is the end of that.Well, maybe not quite. In addition to the aquarium inspiration from his younger days, Vann had some personal motivation fueling this book as well.
My mother and I had difficult times…and we’ve both been looking for ways to forgive each other…Forgiveness figures large here. Our perspective on the events is from Caitlin at 32, looking back on events twenty years before, trying to come to terms with her relationship with her mother, and contemplating the nature of forgiveness. She has some issues with her mother for which absolution is a very live issue. Don’t we all?
I’ve loved tropical fish all my life, at one point in junior high had eight aquariums spread throughout the house. For years, even in upstate New York, in grad school, I had gazed at fish every night, watching how they fluttered, imagined myself suspended in warm water with them, so this [snorkeling in the Tobago Cays] was heaven for me, to spend a little quality time with the fish.
By the end of the century, nearly all fish will be gone. The entire legacy of humanity will be only one thing, a line of red goop in the paleo-oceanographic record, a time of no calcium carbonate shells that will stretch on for several million years. The sadness of our stupidity is overwhelming.
Where to start.....this was a spur of the moment pick for me not knowing what to read next.....you all know the feeling.....so instead of reading one of the umpteen books I already own, I decided to download another on my iPad bc of one review in particular I just happened to see on GR.....
To begin with, I must tell you the pictures of the various fish at the aquarium throughout the book were so amazing and lifelike, they seemed to jump out at me from the screen.....and their significance.....oh their significance
Anyway, I was only about a third of the way in when the creepiness began with an old man befriending a twelve year old (Caitlin) in the darkness of the aquarium, so I kind of thought I knew where the story was headed, but was I ever wrong......the next thing that happened was so shocking, unexpected and unbelievable, I almost could not bear to read it and nearly did call it quits......but continued on.
The bottom line.....if you can endure the horrors committed in this novel, there is a story of love, hope and forgiveness under it all.....but it's one hell of a shocking ride getting there. Not enjoyable, but certainly UNFORGETTABLE!
(Difficult to rate this novel as there were parts I truly did abhor reading, so -1 Star....for now)
Evelyn was staring at me as if I were in a tank, some new species first swimming in the open to be observed. My arms become fins again, but not of lace or leaves. They felt heavy as rock, fins made of stone, unable to grab at the water. Stuck on the ocean floor, held down as eyes peered in, magnified.The feel of the aquarium is starkly different from the feel of the narrator’s home, yet Vann connected the two intimately. It’s at the aquarium or when pondering ocean life that Caitlin is her most introspective and grasps truths about herself and ordinary life; indeed, Aquarium is one of the more quotable books out there:
"Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after. It's the only world. We can't see what it might have looked like otherwise."
"Each thing that happens to us, each and every thing, it leaves some dent, and that dent will always be there. Each of us is a walking wreck."
"The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with a kind of eternity, unbearable."Vann’s priority was scene-setting, because his characters could've used more dimension. That's especially obvious with the old-man character, who's unfailingly caring and meek to the point of saintly. Vann did present a history of some characters that fleshes them out but only somewhat. Mainly he settled for black-and-white portrayals.
The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with a kind of eternity, unbearable.
Parents are gods,Sheri tells Caitlin.
They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that’s the world we know forever after. It’s the only world.