New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2019. 432 pages. $28.00.
“The boy wore a black parka, a matching ski cap, blue jeans, and sneakers; he appeared to be five years old; and he was weeping.” So begins Salvatore Scibona’s long-awaited second novel, The Volunteer, whose first chapter is based on a June 2010 story called “The Kid” that appeared in the New Yorker. The novel follows Scibona’s 2008 National Book Award Finalist The End, a debut that marked its author with comparisons to Saul Bellow, Virginia Wolfe, and Graham Greene. That novel also received the Young Lions Fiction Award and, a few years later, the New Yorker named its author one of its “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. Scibona’s work has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a Whiting Award. He currently directs the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Like Scibona’s first book, The Volunteer possesses an intensity of purpose and takes in a broad sweep of time; here, from the sixties and into the future.
But at this enigmatic start, it is 2010 and the five-year-old boy is alone and lost, speaking an unknown language at the Hamburg-Fuhlsbuettel airport with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money stuffed in the pocket of his coat. Who is this child, and why is he alone?
We quickly meet Elroy Heflin and learn that during an eight-month deployment in Riga, Latvia, Elroy met a woman named Evija and fathered a child named Janis and found himself “sending a third of his pay to a bank in the former Soviet Union for the upkeep of a boy he got to see only about once a year.” When he stopped sending Evija money, Elroy received an email that Evija is moving to Spain and would not take the child; no one would take the boy. Two days later, without a plan as to who would look after Janis once he redeployed to Afghanistan, Elroy flies to Riga to get the boy and the two fly to Hamburg.
To understand this unforgivable and heartbreaking decision by Elroy to abandon Janis, the story flashes back to the late 1960s as Vollie Frade (called the Volunteer and then just Vollie), a restless seventeen year old living with his parents on an Iowa farm, leaves his family to volunteer for the Marines at the height of the Vietnam War. “Within a week of his arrival in the country, Vollie was picking shards of the head of a lance corporal off his shirt, a boy nearly his same age, and hair attached to the shards that smelled of smoke and Brylcreem.”
Vollie continues to reenlist and during his third tour in Vietnam on a classified mission to defend an ammunition dump in Cambodia, he is captured by the North Vietnamese, left in a dark tunnel, fed only rice, and “remembering the life he had led while unremembering his own place in it.” After 412 days (he learns later) in the “nowhere no-time realm of tunnel dark,” he is rescued, taken to a Saigon hospital and recruited by a spook named Percy Lorch to work for an unnamed government operation. At one point, Lorch instructs Vollie that he hasn’t really been in Cambodia because “Congress passed a law. The law said you could not be in Cambodia. Ergo you were not.” Wanting a complete break from his past, Vollie discards his identity, takes the assignment, and becomes Sergeant Dwight Elliot Tilly.
Secrecy and uncertainty abound for Vollie, despite the meetings, briefings, and protocols. Scibona writes: “No single actor bore responsibility for it. This made the chain of consumption resistant to organized interference.” With a new name and identity, he is assigned to move to Queens to verify if a man named Egon Hausmann is dead. After Tilly’s long journey east, he disembarks at Grand Central Station and realizes he was already a part of the city without ever having seen it:
He would take the Number 7 train east into Queens. He would apply for work at a transmission shop, a Pontiac dealership, finally an ice cream warehouse. The city would seem the whole world, its boundaries the boundaries of space; time likewise would seem to stretch to the horizon of time, as if the people here had never been born and never died, and his place among them—a man of perfect inconsequence—were permanent.
At one point, Scibona describes the Queens street scene through the twilight. The description dances in detail, so laser-focused it lifts the setting from the page. “Through the dense world. The auto exhaust and rust blowing off the el girders plastered with faded advertisements for milk on sale, enameled aluminum Bundt pans, ratchet sets. Puddles with mosquito larvae seahorsing in teaming hordes in the runoff from garbage piles.”
Frustrated by the clandestine undertaking after only six months, Tilly runs off to New Mexico and disappears into a free love commune where he finds a makeshift family: free-spirited Louisa and youngster, Elroy Heflin, a child of the commune. But Tilly eventually leaves this family as well.
The story returns to Elroy long enough to learn of his difficult teen years, his criminal conviction and prison time, and eventually, at thirty-one, his enlistment in the army. It was on leave from one of his several tours of duty in Afghanistan that he fathered and abandoned Janis, which the reader learned in the first chapter. Early in the telling, Elroy recalls that Janis abhorred anything presented to him as a condiment.
These are the kinks of habit that evolve into our permanent selves. Elroy, as a child, had always preferred to sleep under sheets tight enough to cramp his toes. This preference had led him to take comfort in the austerities of basic training—they break you down, they build you up again, faster, tighter—and he discovered he had a talent for the breaking down, a talent for forgetting. And then a talent for acting on the impulse to kill.
The story eventually comes back to Janis, a boy with no name and no background who, in 2011, lives in a Hamburg orphanage called St. Therese Home. His only real ally is an elderly Roman Catholic priest who desperately tries to get Janis to share his name with him (which he does not, and the boy is eventually called Willy), to find the child an adoptive family, and ascertain some record of the boy’s past. It is the priest’s exhaustive search that eventually puts him in touch with Dwight Tilly. But despite Tilly’s late attempt to create resolution in his life, he realizes he can’t get away from his past and the chain of events spawned by own series of bad choices. His path culminates in a surprising and tragic reckoning.
Through Scibona’s masterful storytelling, modest, vulnerable characters—vividly imagined—are transformed into cherished and tragic souls able to seize benevolence and love as they try to make sense of an often senseless world. Scibona’s immersive, intense, and somber novel, its language eloquent and moving, deserves and requires a close reading.
In The Volunteer, Scibona weaves the past into the present to create an odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons. At its heart, however, the tale is of a small boy abandoned in a foreign airport and a mysterious “volunteer” who spends his life, without knowing it, trying to find him. “His debt never diminished. The interest compounded. Someday, to someone, it would be paid.” The world where these lost souls travel is one of pathos, violence, and barrenness, the shadow of war ever present. The Volunteer is a stirring examination into the meaning of family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice, and the effects of institutional power at its most horrifying.
