David Vann is surely one of the most powerful writers working today, and his most recent novels Caribou Island (2011) and Goat Mountain (2013) have much in common with this new book. All centre on families at various stages of disintegration as great, rattling skeletons escape from cupboards. His characters are damaged, often beyond repair, but most struggle to love the ones they're with and to be loved in return.
In all of his novels to date, redemption is his major theme - familial, spiritual and emotional. In Goat Mountain a child unwittingly commits manslaughter; in Caribou Island a man single-mindedly follows his dream and causes devastation.
Twelve-year-old Caitlin is our guide into Aquarium. She is the only much-loved child of Sheri Thompson who works as a labourer at a container port in Seattle. The two of them live in dreary, subsidised housing a long drive from the port. Every day Caitlin waits for hours after school for her mother at the aquarium and it's there that she meets a mysterious elderly man with whom she forms an intense friendship.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this seemingly dangerous liaison would take the most expected path, but Vann is a writer who surprises. The character who poses the most risk to the child is the one we least expect.
Caitlin's voice is tough, insightful and honest. Like many children with difficult lives she is mature beyond her years. She is curious and keen to learn, and her light-hearted remarks about her teachers at school betray the poor standard of education she receives. The aquarium provides knowledge for her and extra layers of meaning for the reader, even if Vann's fishy research does occasionally pop its head above the narrative.
