Note: This review contains mild discussion of plot details.
One of the most beloved songs in the Mountain Goats canon is "Going to Georgia", which appeared on their 1994 debut Zopolite Machine and quickly became a live staple. Over a slowly strummed guitar, John Darnielle sings about a man who drives across state lines to see his beloved, unspecifically but seemingly ready for whatever he’ll find. Most ominously, he has a gun in his possession. The potential for danger is there. But in the song, everything works out for the best. Look up a video of Darnielle performing "Going to Georgia", and watch as the crowd joins in shouting along during the song’s exultant peroration, matching his triumphant bellow. To quote the lyrics, it’s a moment where the world appears to shine.
There’s one thing, though: Darnielle doesn’t play "Going to Georgia" in concert anymore. When asked why in a Tumblr question, he responded, "The likelihood that dudes who romanticize their own stalkiness have heard the narrator of ‘Going to Georgia’ run through his schtick and said ‘I can dig it! He must really be in love, to be so fucked up!’ seems pretty high." He added, "As a younger writer I found some romance in that level of self-absorption. I’m grown now."
Twenty years later, Darnielle has just published his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, which tells the story of Sean Phillips—a young man whose life was irreparably ruined by a gunshot wound. That’s a spoiler, but there’s no way to talk about the book without ruining some of what happens; it’s a book that begins after most of the action has taken place and traces its way backwards, meticulously filling in details until Sean's injury is understood. (If you look closely, he alludes to the ending in the first few pages.)
Since his accident, Sean has invested his life in maintaining a series of mail-order role-playing games—think Dungeons & Dragons—that function as a source of income while allowing him some tenuous connection to the outside world. His signature game sets players in a post-apocalyptic world filled with irradiated monsters and murderous scavengers, and asks them to find their way to the Trace Italian—a guarded refuge where some semblance of life before the fall has been maintained. In the course of running the game, he becomes intimately involved with a pair of teenaged players, Lance and Carrie, outcasts who have found their salvation in each other and in this game. Lance and Carrie get too involved, though, and when the novel opens something awful has already happened to them. As we learn more about them, we learn more about Sean, eventually climaxing with the full story of the gun.
Fans of the Mountain Goats will recognize some recurring themes. His work has long been concerned with outsiders, and the way those outsiders cope with a world that doesn’t understand them—sometimes antagonistically so. Part of the reason he’s such an effective songwriter is his uncanny ability to control and articulate the type of passionate feelings that often bubble forth from the soul in uncontrollable, inarticulate ways. It’s no surprise, then, that his audience contains a large swath of younger fans—or fans who came to his music when they were younger—who recognize themselves in his songs. The reading I attended in the spring was the largest that bookstore had ever held, and filled with people who claimed Darnielle's music had saved their lives.
It would be glib to solely focus on Wolf in White Van as it relates to Darnielle’s work as a singer, but the connection seems obvious. His prose is lived-in, intimate. It has the considered cadence of an author reading to an audience, which is understandable given Darnielle’s career as a performer. I never underlined a single sentence for its lyrical virtuosity, but whole passages drew me in with their dreamy, elliptical rhythms. (The passages where Sean is narrating the turns of Trace Italian are particularly entrancing.)
Take this passage, from when Sean is laying in his hospital bed after the accident. As he stares at the ceiling and watches nurses and doctors walk in and out of his room, Darnielle spirals off. "How do they get there—just coming in through the door like that? In the brief moment between infinite communion with the ceiling and the beginning of whatever conversation they’ve come to strike up, it seems like the deepest mystery in the world," he writes. "And then they break the spell, and the world contracts, palpably shifts from one reality into a new and much more unpleasant one, in which there is pain, and suffering, and people who when they are hurt stay hurt for a long time or sometimes forever, if there is such a thing as forever. Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling. It becomes a word you hear in the same way that people who associate sound with color might hear a flat sky-blue. The open sky through which forgotten satellites travel. Forever."
Aside from his parents, Sean spends most of his time alone. As such, he's constantly interpreting his world through the stories he’s immersed himself in for so long. A door is "the sort of open door that if the cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers"; a body at a funeral is one understood as a potential zombie, as Sean imagines "what the screams would sound like if the coffin lin sprung open and something crawled out." When he interacts with a pair of teenagers in a parking lot—the first extended interaction with strangers in the book—he thinks, "I felt like a panel in a comic book." There are constant references to Conan the Barbarian, board games like Stay Alive and sci-fi magazines like Analog. Then there’s the game itself, which overwhelms every aspect of his life.
He’s a relic of nerd culture, growing up in a time where the niche media you consumed might connect you to similar minds—or it might not. Today, a geographically isolated teenager who’s into Conan and Rush and sci-fi can find thousands of other like-minded souls on Tumblr, Twitter, and countless other platforms. But Sean only had a handful of friends to share in his outsider culture—and, as we find out, this has everything to do with his accident. Is it any surprise that he clings to a game that keeps him in touch with other people, or that game enables him to overlook how Lance and Carrie are similarly ruining their lives?
In the last few years, there’s been a shift in what people talk about when they talk about being a "geek" or "nerd," and an obnoxious proof of devotion asked of anyone bold enough to like a comic book or video game without having loved them all their life. That these engrossing hobbies are no longer seen as niche or cult is, in my opinion, a good thing. There was a period in grade school when I spent an almost limitless time playing Japanese role-playing games like "Final Fantasy 8" and surfing message boards where I talked largely about Japanese role-playing games like "Final Fantasy 8." I was lucky to be joined in these activities by real life friends. I was luckier still that we stayed close as we grew older and stopped playing Japanese role-playing games, and that we were never pushed to the fringe because of the things we loved.
Unlike the younger Darnielle’s story in "Going to Georgia", there’s no easy sentimentality or romance here. Darnielle guides us to feel for Sean, not admire him—to understand how his life could've led him, and so many other boys who are "too stupid to take care of themselves" down such a disastrous path. "I’m a little stupid but I’m all right," Sean says, years after the accident. "Lance is young and stupid though, I guess. That’s two strikes." Sean did a stupid thing for stupid reasons, and he’s paid for it with his normal life. It’s not even portrayed as tragic, or unfortunate, but merely factual—a thing that happened, and must now be accepted. The irony of Trace Italian, as we find out, is that this safe place will never be reached in any player’s lifetime because there are too many turns involved. (This echoes a plot point later in the book when Sean learns of an experimental process that may reconstruct his face.) "Technically it’s possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it," Darnielle writes. "No one will ever live that long." Later, he writes that "Trace Italian had existed long enough to earn self-determination." Sean couldn't stop the game, even if he wanted to.
As for the titular wolf and who he is, it’s better not to say; the passage where that’s revealed is the novel’s best. It’s worth noting that wolves have factored into Darnielle’s previous work—specifically, in a song called "Up the Wolves" from 2005’s The Sunset Tree. This is a specious source, but a commenter on the lyrics database Song Meanings claimed that Darnielle explained the song’s meaning at a concert. "I think it's a song about the moment in your quest for revenge when you learn to embrace the futility of it," he reportedly said. "The moment where you know the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you're headed is not the direction you want to go, yet you're going to head that way a while longer cause that's just the kind of person you are." Again, the connection seems obvious.