Wolf in White Van by John DarnielleFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Wolf in White Van is weird and claustrophobic and alternately beautiful and bleak. Its narrator, Sean Phillips, is the creator of Trace Italian, a text-based game played through the mail. Sean doesn’t go out much: he suffered a disfiguring injury when he was seventeen, in which he almost died but didn’t, and his reconstructed face, twentyish years afterwards, is still a wreck. He doesn’t really get out of his head, and neither does the narrative: he ruminates on choices and the lack of them, reasons and the lack of them, the branching paths that make up a life: things done, things undone, paths and doors closed off by how things went. The game, Trace Italian, is like that, too: a player reads a scenario and makes a move, and that move takes the player in a particular direction, opening particular options and removing others. So right: there’s Sean and his life, and there’s the game, and there are Carrie and Lance, two high school kids playing Trace Italian who decide to take their play into the actual world.

There’s a lot in this book about the life of the imagination and the inner life generally: the things in our heads, the things that stay there and don’t get expressed, the things that do get expressed that maybe shouldn’t have, or that maybe should have been expressed in some different way. Sean talks about his childhood fantasies, about “Backyard Conan, thrown together from half-understood comic books only”: “I ruled a smoking wrecked kingdom with a hard and deadly hand. It was dark and gory. No one liked living there, not even its king. It had a soundtrack. All screams” (7).

I liked the first half of this book a lot, especially some of the passages that are introductions to the story and mechanics and origins of Trace Italian, the way it plays and the way that Sean relates to the players, and some of the passages about Sean reflecting on incidents from his childhood, like this:

I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in the summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. (107)

But the second half of the book fell sort of flat for me, and I’m not sure why. The story is told mostly in reverse, with other digressions into memory, and maybe that’s part of it: you know the story is working its way toward the full story of Sean’s injury, and maybe I didn’t want to read that story. Maybe, too, it’s that I wanted more of other people, more of Lance and Carrie, who aren’t in the book’s second half. Maybe I was just more interested in Sean’s present/more recent past, everything after the defining event, than I was in the defining event or the lead-up to it.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

2 responses to “Wolf in White Van by John DarnielleFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014”

  1. Jenny @ Reading the End Avatar

    Yeah, I was out towards the second half, too. I thought the second half didn’t have enough — I don’t want to say surprises, because I don’t think the main function of a book is to surprise, but I thought the second half of the book felt like exactly what I would have expected. To the point that I wasn’t sure why I was bothering to finish it, when it was just going to be exactly what I thought the whole way through. :/

  2. Heather Avatar
    Heather

    Glad it wasn’t just me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *