Cryptically structured, glacially paced but with volcanic flashpoints, Salvatore Scibona’s new book keeps you guessing as to what it’s even about. A mix of war novel, spy thriller and family saga, set in the US, Germany and Latvia, ranging in time from the invasion of Vietnam to post-9/11 Afghanistan, it eventually emerges as a kind of 400-page backstory to its alarming prologue – a bravura piece of writing that reels you in before Scibona starts to make us sweat over his purpose.
It’s 2010 and we’re in the company of a US soldier, Elroy, a one-time jailbird and ex-addict who once got a waitress pregnant while posted to Latvia. The child, Janis, is now five and his mother is letting him go; she emails Elroy to come to Riga between tours of Afghanistan and take him to America. He arrives without a plan, and ends up – perhaps accidentally on purpose – abandoning Janis in a toilet cubicle at Hamburg airport before continuing on his way home alone.
This is heart-rending stuff, superbly done, as Scibona cuts between their points of view. Janis refuses to talk to airport staff, believing Elroy will be back for supper, and blaming himself on account of the crayon he broke on the flight they shared from Riga to Hamburg.
Meanwhile we see Elroy panic, scheme (he dumps Janis’s bag during a London layover) and minimise, as he tells someone expecting to see Janis back in America: “Yeah, it didn’t work out, you know?”
Half the book passes before we see Elroy again. In the meantime, we visit the childhood of the man who raised him, Vollie, an Iowan farm boy who enlists to fight in Vietnam to spite his elderly parents. Later, he’s captured on what he suspects might be an illicit cross-border foray in Cambodia; but when he’s freed, an intelligence high-up insists that none of it happened, and that Vollie, having actually deserted, must now, in lieu of punishment, serve as a spy in New York, something his survivor’s guilt makes him only too happy to do.
Scibona lavishes attention on practically everyone his sprawling narrative reveals, including a teenage girl caught up in Vollie’s bungled espionage operation, targeting a suspected Nazi war criminal; and, later, a priest trying to crack the mystery of Janis’s origins as he grows up in care in Germany. Much, much more time passes before Vollie (now going by the name of Tilly) enters Elroy’s life when he meets Louisa, the last hippy standing at a ruined Nevada commune, left holding the baby born of its failed free love experiment.
As years pass, with Tilly’s handlers lurking in the wings, we see that the grownup Elroy might be replaying a boyhood abandonment of his own. Callous, unpredictable, he’s a frightening creation, yet the time we spend with him as a child, craving Tilly’s approval, complicates our response to him, both at the novel’s opening and its melodramatically bloody climax.
The novelist Rachel Kushner calls Scibona “gravely, terminally, a born writer”, which will be ominous praise for some, and while he has a flair for tense, drawn-out passages of dialogue that sharpen into a crisis, a certain solemnity is undeniably the price of admission here (“A person was a world that walked through the world,” Vollie thinks, musing on “disremembered acts of greed and thirst”). It’s a mark of The Volunteer’s success that, despite this, its doomy vision of intergenerational misery feels more powerful than put on as a grim irony starts to gather around the book’s title, Scibona portraying nothing less than existence itself as a trauma no one ever signs up for.
• The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
