"Vacation" is All I Ever Wanted

I gave myself seven days to read Deb Olin Unferth’s “Vacation,” knowing nothing more than the title of the book and name of the author. After a couple of pages, I realized this wasn’t a typical picture-less book. As I kept reading, the story sank deeper and deeper into Nicaraguan jungles while detailing the frustrating impotence of a realist world inhabited by romantic-minded characters. All read and done, I had virtuously (and inadvertently) exceeded my aforementioned reading goal and finished the disheartening, yet somehow uplifting, saga in two days.

The most apparent device employed in the novel is the ever-shifting perspective of the story. The book starts off in the mind of a young Claire as she rides a train next to an odd, quiet man. When chapter two hits, the perspective shifts to a third-person point of view, following the odd, quiet man, now known as Myers. While this got my attention, it wasn’t a wholly new concept. In fact, I think the Animorph Chronicles employed the same technique when I was in fifth grade. However, any sensible pattern stops there as the story follows Myers for some time before switching, not to Claire again but to Grey. Later Myers’s wife regales the reader firsthand. Then Grey, a volunteer nurse, Myers again, Nicaraguan refugee, etc. In fact, no less than eight characters provide a point-of-view throughout the story, though there’s no page equality.

While this technique kept me guessing and interested in the same situation read multiple times, I would also fault it as the biggest flaw of the book. The half-dozen minor characters granted between 2-10 pages of perspective are not fleshed out to be whole characters themselves nor do any of them directly affect the story in a way more prominent characters could not or did not do. These side-character perspectives increased in frequency as the story went on but end up taking the reader to a mind they may not have wanted to be. After investing upwards of 200 pages to Myers and Grey (who by now is sick and missing in Panama, though still believing to be in Nicaragua) I find it unreasonable to be shoved into the viewpoint of a one-chapter, beach-fairing bikini model—again no pictures. What made the side characters in Nicaragua more important than the characters in New York or Syracuse from earlier in the story? This is just one of a few unanswerable questions sprinkled throughout the travelers’ stories.

On a smaller level, Unferth’s linguistic nuances strike a cord with me. She uses parallel repetition to a devastating effect as seen with, “my mother was hit by a car and she felt it and she died and we felt it.” What would normally be scoffed at by my English teachers rings of deep, (clumsy) poetry to me. These little repeated phrases sometimes immediately follow each other, sometimes separated by entire paragraphs. Putting a literary plant in the beginning of a story only to have the payoff chapters later is a common and powerful technique that can make an audience feel smart because then the ending is deserved, expected, fitting and original. On the smaller level, as from sentence to sentence, the effect is the same. I, if not readers in general, like the technique, employ it myself and believe Unferth executed it consistently throughout the story, unabated by the individual character perspectives.

And lastly, and briefly, I’d like to applaud Unferth’s unquoted, unqualified and unpunctuated dialogue snippets. I find this style easy to read and more natural than having every piece of dialogue followed with some variation (or not) of “Myers said.” I don’t mean to credit Unferth for inventing the style as Ernest Hemmingway, Cormac McCarthy and others beat her to the typewriter, but I appreciate it all the same and have found myself lifting the technique in some of my own narratives. (Nonsensical blog plug!)

Fortunately for readers of this review there are plenty more cultural and literary layers to this troubling and humorous excursion to a tragically failed paradise in Central America—including the relatively (or criminally) unmentioned plot. Regardless, this book successfully fires on far more cylinders than any reader can realistically ask of a book nowadays. Some vacations suck but this book doesn’t.