The volunteer : a novel /

EVEN AN INEXHAUSTIBLE SUBJECT can become tired. The treatment of selfhood, arguably the richest subject for the novel, has taken two notable courses in recent American fiction. After the memoiristic work we called auto-fiction has come another kind of novel that, perhaps overwhelmed by the absurdity and sprawl of political reality, moves just beyond the self to draw highly circumscribed worlds - a trio of characters, say, absorbed in their own relations, in one setting, over a year or so. (I should say I have read and admired many of these novels, and also that I wrote one of them.) One of the most thrilling things about Salvatore Scibona's second book, "The Volunteer," is a refusal not just of this novelistic trend of smallness, but also of our own craven, personal brand-driven cultural moment. This novel's question is not how a person might become himself through "finding," but how he might lose everything, and, through losing, gain an honest apprehension of the world. We begin with a small boy abandoned in an airport. His father, Elroy, leaves this unwanted child behind and makes his way to the man who was once his legal guardian, whom we come to know as Vollie Frade. He is another unwanted son, born to aging cattle ranchers in rural Iowa. What follows is a magnificent counterpoint of four generations of fathers and sons who roam geography and experience as Scibona braids the narrative strands of his various men in a way that is both disciplined and symphonic. What an audacity to build a novel around a character preoccupied with self-erasure! But, for a nobody, the main character of Scibona's novel is a compelling somebody: Vollie is a nickname of a nickname (the eponymous Volunteer), but why his parents call him this remains a mystery, as does his real name, as does his very character. At 17 he shocks himself when he signs up with the Marines, an acte gratuit that prompts his mother to remark, "I'm surprised they let a person just take himself away like that." This is neither the first nor last instance of Vollie taking himself away; he has already experienced a hallucinatory vision of self-loss when, as a small boy, he watched his parents burn his clothes as a precaution against an outbreak of meningitis. To Vollie, it seems that it's him they're burning. Afterward, a revelation: "His self was a 'who' who had burned away in the flames; but the creature was a 'what' that could endure even this. The self that had seemed all of him was only a part; it could be shed and left behind." When he contracts the illness nonetheless, it's his first almost-death of many. Later, as a Marine in Cambodia in the 70s, "he kept on unaccountably not getting killed." Scibona is a savage coiner of similes, one who'll cut sublimity with bathos to snatch a reader's breath away: "In the night, he went out to piss, and the stars were like a kitchen mess across a dark floor." There are also roving, lyrical long shots of Queens streets that, in their grit and dazzle, recall the boyhood Bronx of Don DeLillo's "Underworld." Like DeLillo in that book, Scibona wreaks an epic from the lives of ordinary, supposedly negligible men. His lens zooms in and out of streets, rooms, consciousnesses. It becomes kaleidoscopic during those moments in which, with sickening inexorability, a life can go wrong. Appropriately for a novel of the anti-self, much of this wrongness is passively accomplished: A man fails to prevent a murder, a man fails to father his son, another father fails to defend himself against another son. Here is a masculinity not of muscular exertion but baleful inaction. A particular American violence seems refracted among these men, and it's such violence that induces one character to think, "A person was a world that walked through the world." By paying grave attention to both worlds, both the self and everything beyond it, Scibona has built a masterpiece. Hermione hoby is the author of the novel "Neon in Daylight."

When he enlisted, Vollie Frade exchanged the Iowa farmland of his childhood for the jungles of Vietnam and quickly observed that those who fear death have an uncanny way of turning that concern prophetic. He subsequently adopts a devil-may-care philosophy, but on his third tour, Vollie is captured and held in a subterranean tunnel. Upon his release, he is provided a new identity as Dwight Tilly and coerced into a black ops unit with mysterious goals and murkier ethics. After an assignment leaves a young girl dead, Dwight heads to New Mexico in search of an old army pal only to discover a derelict adobe home and a young woman, Louisa, and a young boy, Ellroy, the last inhabitants of an idealistic commune. Dwight and Louisa endeavor to raise the boy and start a family until Dwight's past catches up with him. Scibona's lyrical yet muscular prose anchors this majestic work as he probes deep philosophical questions about family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice. A present-day story line follows Ellroy's son, whom Ellroy abandoned in a Hamburg airport and who has been raised in a German orphanage. Scibona's greatest strength is his ability to inhabit each character with profound psychological depth to explore their guilt, doubt, and humanity. This novel rewards close reading and deserves wide readership.--Bill Kelly Copyright 2010 Booklist

Scibona's spirited second novel (after 2008 National Book Award Finalist The End) begins in 2010 as a man abandons a child at the Hamburg-Fuhlsbuttel airport. The story then flashes back to the late 1960s as underage Iowan Vollie Frade volunteers for the Marines. While serving in Vietnam, he meets mystery man Percy Lorch, who recruits him for an unnamed government spook operation. Vollie's assignment is to move to Queens to verify whether a man named Egon Hausmann is dead. But after six months, fed up with his covert masters' veil of secrecy, Vollie escapes from Queens and heads for New Mexico, where he disappears into a free love commune. There he finds a wife, the free-spirited Louisa, and young son, Elroy Heflin, a child of the commune. But Vollie ends up abandoning his makeshift family after a stint as a barbed wire inspector. Elroy goes on to see action during several tours of duty in Afghanistan while fathering and abandoning a child of his own. The story ultimately comes back to Vollie, who finds that he can't escape the bad decisions of his past. Like the late Robert Stone, Scibona exhibits a command of language and demonstrates a knack for dramatizing the tidal pull of history on individual destiny. The novel accrues real power as its vividly imagined characters try to make sense of an often senseless world. This is a bold, rewarding novel. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A soldier who goes off to war returns, but the war continues for generations to come.The child is father to the man. But who is the child's father, and what are the true names and identities of both father and son? Scibona (The End, 2008) delivers an enigmatic story that hinges on secrecy and uncertainty. Vollie Frade, befitting his name, joins the Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam War, forging his father's signature because he's still a minor, shocking his mother, who says resignedly, "I'm surprised they let a person just take himself away like that." With that, Vollie is off to a place in which he will experience all the customary hells of war but where he will also shed one identity to take another. "He kept on unaccountably not getting killed," writes Scibona, but odd bits of metal and ugly misadventures find him anywayand so does a spook named Lorch, a specialist in the "more modern intelligence function of covert operations," who instructs Vollie that although he had been in Cambodia, he really hadn't, because Congress had passed a law against crossing into Cambodia: "Ergo you were not." Equipped with a new name and job, Vollie roams a world in which meaning is resolutely unfixed. He acquires a wife and son along the way, and happiness does not ensue; the mood turns to Carver territory, punctuated by occasional improbabilities more suited to Pynchon, leading up to a spasm of violence that's unexpected but perfectly appropriate. As with his first novel, with which it has thematic similarities, Scibona's story takes in a broad sweep of time, looking into the future to foresee an end that may not be so terrible but that is just as certain. The plot sometimes threatens to come off the rails, but throughout, the narrative is marked by distinctive lyricism and striking images: "They were standing on a street corner in 1973. The sun fell everywhere like a terrible shower, and they cast no shadows."A touch overlong and sometimes perplexing but original and memorable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.