He’s not so much anxious about the world as in awe of its latent possibilities. He has no idea what that is - but he feels that crude, home recorded thrash metal, Conan the Barbarian and obscure Brazilian sword brochures, for example, are a hint to him about a possible way to find whatever it is he’s missing and knows exists. He wants something authentic, something his, something other than that his parents have drifted into.
More specifically how we impose fictional conviction - stories - on events that cannot be rationally comprehended, such as our lives.Ĭase in point: Sean, our narrator and protagonist, is an outsider, happy to drift off into the margins, even amongst his group of fellow square pegs. What it seems predominantly to be about, and what I responded to in particular, was the book’s preoccupation with story. I think it’s partly about the dividing line between childhood and adulthood: a lament for all those myriad things we leave behind whenever we become adult, or take with us, with all the issues that involves. They live on separate, permanently estranged worlds, Darnielle has it, largely because kids reshape theirs on a moment-to-moment basis and create countless others and adults are too busy getting to grips with what they see as the “real version,” manageable, navigable, compromised. John Darnielle’s fine debut is a somber, contemplative piece about devastation and how adults and children can never meet in any middle. One, Wolf in White Van (2014) is a book about withdrawal, about finding fictional role models when there’s a scarcity of “real” ones, about self-protection by means of disappearing into fiction, about being way more distant from your parents than you are from Conan or rock stars or figures you’ve created from nothing, about eschewing life osmosis and mistrusting reality. That’s quite a lengthy passage to open with, but it’s fairly illustrative of a number of things. I did something terrible to his son once. It isn’t really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I could make it easier for him if I tried hard enough. Dad was getting ready to tell me about the funeral plans, I knew. In truth I have very little hair on my head now, and the hair I do have tends to clump in stringy clusters, but if my eyes are closed and my concentration is strong I can form a different picture of myself in my mind, so this is what I did, standing by the waist-high desk where the phone was.
Conan the Barbarian has no parents, as far as I know, but in my mind he was my model: trying to stand strong and brave, sword in hand, black hair flowing.
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