the volunteer (salvatore scibona)

The Volunteer is a big American novel. Why the North Americans seem so much more adept at writing on a grander scale than the British over the course of the past century or so is a great topic for a PhD. Suffice it to say that a host of writers from that continent seem prepared and permitted to write on a scale that encompasses and investigates the sweep of history. The comparison that most readily springs to mind with Scibona’s novel is DeLillo. There’s a willingness to both make surprising narrative shifts and build towards a grandstand scene which echoes a novel like Underworld. Having said that, the voice is distinctly his own, a voice that seems to hunt the unrevealed truths of history in corners where no-one else has previously thought to look. 

There is, it might be said, an exception to this, which is when the volunteer of the title, Volie Frade, participates in the Vietnam war, in a bravura piece of writing. However, even Scibona’s Vietnam is covert, as Frade is captured whilst on unofficial duty in Cambodia, during a military action which officially doesn’t exist. Frade, whose name is changed as he reinvents himself, is one of three orphans in the novel. This sense of an absence of roots appears to contribute to the perpetration of a national violence, a violence whose rationale has more to do with genetic discord than political need. A violence which is born of a sense of being dislocated. Scibona follows a thread which leads from the Second World War through to Vietnam, through to the imperial Middle Eastern adventures of the twentieth century and could perhaps lead, as in the literature of Saunders, to a form of militaristic despair which turns back in on itself, something which was threatened during the rump reign of Trump.  

The author explores these themes, which also take in the idea of destiny, the failure of sixties counter culture and the shimmering persistence of Christianity as a factor in modern society, in pages of sometimes dense, sinuous prose. He’s never scared of heading off into a digression which might cast light on his story that even he is unclear about (the German refugee, the Dutch divorcee). At times one wonders where this is all headed, and as a writer he seems enamoured of the non-connections, a resistance to the insistent logic of story, as characters refuse to meet, or remain in the dark, or simply forget about things that once upon a time seemed of transcendental importance. This is what a novel of this scale can afford to do; to recognise that life is as many blind alleys as it is roman roads. That the other lives characters (such as ourselves) might have lived are always around the corner, a corner not taken.