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The Human Face a Furnace Seal’d: John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van

The new novel from the man behind the Mountain Goats suggests that the mind is a dangerous playground.
puzzle face

The new novel from indie music hero John Darnielle is a moving tribute to the power of the imagination. But not in the way you might think.

The novel’s setup is fairly simple. Sean, the narrator, suffered severe facial disfigurement from a gunshot wound sometime in his early life—the kind of disfigurement which makes him hard to look at, which makes other people recoil from him. But after decades of learning to accept his situation, he’s patient, quiet, and hopeful. He’s even managed to turn his suffering into a vocation: He supplements his insurance payments by creating play-by-mail adventure games. He personally guides subscribers through fantasy realms he devised as he recuperated alone in his hospital bed. The most elaborate and alluring of these worlds is Trace Italian.

This game takes place in an environmentally-devastated future America filled with mutants and bounty hunters. Your task is to reach the Trace Italian, an impregnable star-shaped refuge in the Kansas hinterlands, underneath which lies the one remaining city of survivors. Sean has never bothered to depict the underground city itself, and even the inner defenses of the Trace are sketchy at best, because no player has ever gotten that far.

I arranged the bottles into a loosely octagonal formation on the counter, and I pictured a very small person sitting at the center of the octagon, no bigger than the distal joint of my little finger, bored but safe, half-crazy from isolation but protected from the outside world. That person was me. My parents would have asked the younger me, what do you want to be safe from? After the accident nobody would ask. That was, to put it harshly, the best thing about the rifle blast that destroyed most of my face.

Already you can sense that Sean’s imagination is not the self-made haven he seems to think it is. Wolf in White Van is itself a puzzle game, with clues dropped gradually so the reader can piece together the terrible things that have happened—to Sean, and to two dedicated players of Trace Italian, two seekers who went rogue—and examine possible reasons for these events.

Misreading is one of the book’s central themes. Sean’s parents, desperately grasping for some kind of explanation for what happened to their son, flail around and try to blame everyone in sight, from their friendly local gun-shop owner to Sean’s favorite bands and authors. Sean insists that none of these people were to blame: that sometimes things happen for no reason.

Slowly you start to suspect that Sean himself has drastically misunderstood the actions of a player whose story he has used for a long time to reassure himself, a player whose early exit from the game seemed to prove to Sean that Trace Italian remained a safe and purely internal place, with no repercussions in the real world. Sean writes at one point, “It is a little strange to me, to be defending something that was supposed to have been a place where people could feel safe and have fun, where nothing ever really happens except inside our heads.” But very little which starts inside our heads completely stays there–and anyway, the mind itself is a place, where significant things happen. Rage is real even if you smile through it. Humility is real, even if nobody else notices it. Sean has a lot of both.

Wolf in White Van has a lot in common with Darnielle’s previous novel, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality: a protagonist who was hurt in early life, hurt in a way which makes other people misunderstand and judge him; a depiction of the retreat into the mind, what fantasy feels like when reality is too hard to bear; surly teens who like surly music for reasons they find hard to articulate; a rippling current of thwarted rage. But the narrator of Master of Reality puts his rage up-front, and the persevering, heartbreakingly hopeful kid underneath only reveals himself slowly. Wolf in White Van works in the opposite direction, from the battered-but-smiling exterior to the dark skull-decked throne within.

Some of Darnielle’s songs touch this same place, where violence can be directed outward or inward or both at once: the punch that breaks the knuckles. Fantasies of returning to your hometown with “TEC-9s stored under the floorboards” and fantasies of “shoving our heads/straight into the guts of the stove” are fueled by the same rage, which billows bigger than any possible cause might justify. The imagination is a secret garden—full of snakes. Or ghosts: “Old feelings, long pressed down to where they couldn’t do any more harm, shed weight and rose inside me like vapor. They felt, to me, the way ghosts are supposed to look.”

To the extent that Wolf‘s worldview reminded me of any other book, it wasn’t Master of Reality but Cujo. There’s the same insistence on the meaninglessness of life’s horror: Nobody’s flying this plane. Darnielle adds that we seek refuge—unmotivated, before there’s any reason to seek it, acting on impulse—but the refuges we create are built out of our own minds. They’re salvaged from old repurposed hatreds and glued together with inchoate longings. True refuge is unimaginable because we’ve never experienced it. (This reverses what I vaguely remember as St. Augustine’s claim that we can recognize goodness and joy in this life because we share the memory of Adam’s happiness in Eden.)

I don’t want to make this book sound like it simply condemns the imagination, or the attempt to build an interior shelter. The mere attempt to create the Trace Italian is poignant, and the patience and perseverance Sean brings to this task are real. This is a book about the things books about the Triumph of the Human Spirit are about, and those are good things; it’s just that they don’t always triumph, in part because there’s a lot more in the Human Spirit than patience and perseverance. There’s also—and the scenes which reveal the meaning of the book’s title are terrific—the wolf in white van.

Eve Tushnet is a TAC contributing editor, blogs at Patheos.com, and is the author of the recently-released book Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith.


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