Salvatore Scibona’s second novel, a tale of responsibility, abandonment and the ties that don’t bind, opens with a small boy left like unclaimed baggage at Hamburg airport. The child, who speaks no German or English and may well be from Latvia, is initially seen as a glitch in the system, the tragic victim of a freak accident. The subsequent narrative suggests he’s anything but. The Volunteer is a family epic built on shifting sand, inhabited by people perpetually on the brink of flight. The non-space of the airport is a peripheral hell. But it’s also the tale’s most secure and stable location.
Where Scibona’s acclaimed 2010 debut The End confined itself to a single location (an Italian-American community in Cleveland, Ohio) and time frame (1953), his long-awaited follow-up slips the net to roam far and wide, almost to a fault. In charting three lost generations of American men, it swings from 1950s Iowa, to 60s Vietnam, to 70s New York, before finally bounding a decade into the future, in search of sanctuary or escape, whichever comes first. The story is bold, flawed and compromised. It’s a muscular account of human frailty and a pitiless critique of western masculinity that’s nonetheless drawn to the thrill of battle and the click of hard-boiled dialogue, largely content to leave its female characters in the wings. The Volunteer drifts and broods and wallows in dysfunction. But its cumulative power is like sustained rolling thunder.
The abandoned boy at the airport, we learn, is Janis, the offspring of a wayward US soldier named Elroy Heflin. And Heflin in turn is the adoptive son of Vollie Frade, the volunteer of the title, who enlisted to fight in Vietnam, only to be captured during a covert mission to Cambodia. On emerging from his underground prison (another non-space), Vollie is recruited by US intelligence, who provide him with a new name – Dwight Tilly – and put him to work as a special-ops spy. “You’ll be a legend among all the people who never speak of such things,” his handler enthuses.
The Volunteer sticks closest to established literary coordinates during its focus on Vietnam, catching the paradox of a conflict that was at once overexposed (beamed into US living rooms every night) and oddly invisible (a national humiliation, conducted by means of subterfuge and deceit). Scibona’s middle section sparks memories of Denis Johnson’s labyrinthine Tree of Smoke or Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, in which a stolen bag of heroin serves as a metaphor for the war’s poisonous legacy, while Lorch, Frade’s devilish handler, plays like an off-the-peg Pynchon character, his speech a weave of non sequiturs and Bible verse. The war, it’s apparent, has resulted in a generation of casualties: homecoming heroes who can never truly go home. We see them hiding out in flyblown hippy communes or working long hours as long-distance truckers, fighting back tears behind the wheels of their rigs.
All of which is well-trodden terrain. But Scibona elects to lead us still further upriver. Recovering at the veterans’ hospital, Frade jumps at the chance to undergo what Lorch refers to as “hard clearing”, forsaking his family to become “a nobody from nowhere”. In old age, still “concealed and concealing”, he confesses to an insurance clerk that he has no email address and can’t rightly say the colour of his own eyes. “You fly in the dark, Mr Tilly,” she replies, unaware that even the man’s name is a fiction. No doubt PTSD is to blame for Frade’s retreat. Yet, intriguingly, Scibona implies that wartime trauma is merely a catalyst for a wider impulse. It’s the desire for renewal hardwired into the American DNA; a longing for escape that has become thwarted and unsound. In this post-Vietnam landscape, the frontier has closed and energies have turned inward. These characters don’t want to be sons, or fathers, or the men they once were. Their last great reinvention is an act of self-erasure.
Slowly, deliberately, Scibona shows how Frade’s inheritance gets passed on like a football between players. This is his curse, or a burden to be shed, and it shifts from him to rackety Heflin and finally on to Janis, ditched on a whim at the departure gate in Hamburg. After all the decades of angst and pain, one might almost regard it as an unwitting act of mercy. Janis, aged five, at least has nothing to run from: no identity to dismantle or history to rub out. The boy is living the dream of his forefathers, with a guilt-free fresh start and a new name to get used to. “He liked the name,” Scibona writes. “It came from nothing and pointed nowhere and left him free.” He’s the unblemished fruit of a dark family tree.
• The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona is published by Jonathan Cape (RRP £16.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
