Aquarium starts unassumingly enough, suspended in the blue hush of a Seattle aquarium. David Vann (Dirt; Caribou Island) introduces the reader to 12-year-old Caitlin, the voice of this high-velocity narrative. In a novel rife with violent exchanges of power, it's one of few moments when life might be described as peaceful. Hold on to that feeling, it won't last long.
The novel hinges on an encounter between Caitlin and an elderly man at the aquarium, the implications of which threaten to shatter her precarious sense of family. Vann's greatest triumph is his illustration of the personae orbiting Caitlin like so many moons--her mother, Sheri, a volatile shipyard worker who feels robbed of her own adolescence; her mother's affable but ineffectual boyfriend, Steve, who fails to intercede during Sheri's bouts of rage; and Shalini, Caitlin's more-than-best-friend, whose refinement and international upbringing stand in stark contrast to the Seattle of Caitlin's life. Save for the tropical fish in their tanks, which she visits daily, she has known only a city cold and lacking in color. Vann includes helpful photographs of each underwater specimen, like the square-headed, grumpy silver ghost and twig-like, luminescent ghost pipefish.
Occasionally, the language falters--"I wanted all of the sadness to stop and everyone to just come together," says the otherwise eloquent Caitlin--but the dialogue is so sharp it's sometimes painful. Sheri's epithets are simultaneously stringent and sickeningly believable. Steve's kindly ineptitude is heartbreaking, then infuriating. Caitlin begins as a helpless child, but by the novel's close, she navigates her perilous circumstances with the grace of a fish in midstream. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer