dirt

Dirt by David Vann (Harper, 2013) 

The story of  Galen, a strange, stunted young man who lives with his damaged and eccentric mother on the family’s crumbling walnut farm in California’s Central Valley.  I suppose it is about the replenishing legacy of abuse as it is handed — or battered — down the generations.  The mother and son, along with an aunt, cousin, and grandmother, make a disastrous annual pilgrimage to their mountain cabin.  A very sad and dark book, but the talented author writes with originality and clarity so that world of the book and its characters have a stunning complexity and reality.  Several visceral and disturbing descriptions of sex and violence, which are juxtaposed with beautiful descriptive passages of the physical world and many finely rendered moments of poignant humanity.  A thrilling, disturbing, and brilliant book. 

I read this book as a judge  for the St. Francis College Literary Prize (which honors a mid-career fiction writer) and was pleased that it won.