“Without striking any hysterical notes, Vann’s writing gradually marks out a score of unholy human pain. There are hints of Hemingway in the control of the style, but the tide and undertow of its meaning are Dostoevskian. Father and son cannot leave this place. You, the reader, will not be able to leave it either.”
— Alexander Linklater on David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide, which is probably my top book of 2009 (unless something else makes me gasp in the next two and a half months).
