Life in the Land of Living

by Daniel Vilmure

Slightly creased cover, previous owner's inscription on the FEP

Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann]

"This remarkable first novel tells the grim story of two brothers who, on a hot and volatile August night in a Florida port town, roam as if in a nightmare from one sad misadventure to the next. The violence and tragedy of their lives--a legacy passed down from their abusive, alcoholic father and promiscuous mother--is inescapable; they hasten to it with each step they take to flee from it.

"Author Daniel Vilmure does not coddle or pander to his audience. He declines to name the brothers or to establish precisely their ages. One can only guess that they are about 11 and 16. All but two of the chapters are narrated by the younger brother, and much of the book’s irony derives from his limited point of view. The other two chapters are narrated by the older brother, who is illiterate. His discovery of the truth of his paternity initiates the story’s headlong rush toward disaster.

"Despite the verbal limitations of his two narrators, Vilmure manages to convey, vividly and viscerally, the complex emotions--the confusion, anger, frustration, and rage--felt by his characters. The transmission of these feelings is so direct that one hardly notices the intermediary role that literary technique plays. Only upon rereading does one fully appreciate how skillfully this talented young writer weaves recurring images, motifs, and complex psychological states into one seamless whole." From the review in The Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1987 (can be found at: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...).

I have begun my review by quoting the above review because the synopsis on Goodreads is totally inadequate and I do want to encourage others to read this exceptionally fine novel. There is another splendid review from The Harvard Crimson at: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/19... but as it goes into more plot detail then I would want to reveal. The Harvard Crimson is also the literary magazine of Harvard which Daniel Vilmure contributed while at Harvard, and the articles he wrote for it can be found at: https://www.thecrimson.com/writer/940...). I also want to quote a brief extract from the review the novel received from The New York Times:

"A gratifying first novel. The talent of the author, who was born in Tampa in 1965, shines in the books compelling imagery, irony and framing device. His vivid terse language aptly embodies the hard-driving, violent drama, and makes us feel we are running through the night with these brothers driven by a painful loss of innocence, and fate."

I have provided so many quotes from others because I loved this novel and am afraid that my words won't be sufficient to encourage you to seek out and read this powerful, beautiful and moving novel. I suppose I should add that this is not tale of happy-ever-after but more along the lines of Scott Fitzgerald's disillusioned 'there are no second acts in American lives' except in 'Life in the Land of the Living' the two unnamed brothers have no hope of reaching an entr'acte, never mind a second act. They are the first generation of children to experience the death of the American dream after the launch of the wonders of monetarism and trickle-down economics by Reagan and his successors. Their parents (although it is unstated it is clear they are under forty) can remember when their unnamed Florida town was a bustling port but for the sons it a wasteland as scorered clean of life as the ruins of Pompeii but considerably less substantial.

Within the desolation of their town, the boys' lives and everything around them the only thing that the two brothers have is their love and dependence on each other for meaning and purpose. But don't expect a greeting card warm-and-fuzzy type of feel-good relationship of two-against the world. This is a codependent love based on violence, alcohol and pain, but that makes it all the more real because love in families is complicated. The two brothers in Mr. Vilmure's novel resemble characters from Cervantes with the elder brother in the process of being consumed by demons as horrifying as Quixote's giants while the younger brother is a Sancho Panza whose dogged loyalty is magnificent as well as tragic.

It is a great novel and like all great novels whose authors fail to find a niche in New York's publishing world of back slapping self-promotion, it and he, have vanished into that sub-basement of near total obscurity that only Goodreads and the two reviews, one of them this one, now posted against this novel (as of September 2024) tries to rescue it from.

[Karl Kraus]

Two adolescent brothers from a broken, abusive home, hungry, sleepless to the point of waking dreams, beset with hallucinations (which one killed their father? both of them? neither?), and the more violent of the two going through definite alcoholic withdrawal, in the course of one ever more horrific night that sees them soaked with sewage and blood. And yet there's something moving about the devotion the two have for each other, marred as it is by frequent acts of brutality. Definitely emotionally overwrought (*Toby's Lie* is equally intense but considerably better controlled); not every detail rings true (if you douse a building and yourself with gasoline, how do you strike a match without igniting yourself?), and told with language that's awfully poetic for a first-person narrator of this type (one of the brothers), but still it's awfully difficult to put down. Vilmure apparently hasn't written anything since *Toby's Lie* -- and that was a quarter-century ago! -- and seems to have pretty much cut himself off from the world; I hope that if he's wrestling demons, he eventually comes out on top.

3 1/2 stars, curved upward for the depiction of Florida hell.