Quirky and elegantly written, VACATION is a typical McSweeney’s book. The story is a combination of the banal and the odd; a simple tale of an unraveling marriage that takes a sharp detour into the surreal.

The convoluted plot can be difficult to follow but Unferth’s beautiful prose – by turns bleak, deadpan, haunting and cynical – makes reading a pleasure. Observations like “the house was the muted color of a people dominated by the landscape, people who just wanted to get something down that won’t blow away” or “a man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were trapped in air and light” are examples of Unferths’ writing at its best. But six competing narrative voices and the increasingly improbable progress of the plot can be frustrating.

A short synopsis:

Several years before the start of VACATION, the protagonist Meyers discovers that his wife has developed an obsession with another man, a stranger. She follows this stranger wherever he goes, all the while telling her husband that she’s busy with work. What she doesn’t realize is that Myers spots her lies immediately and begins to follow her while she follows the stranger: and, for many months, that’s how the couple spend their evenings. Myers is unable to confront his wife about her bizarre behavior, and she is unable to admit it.

When the stranger moves away, Myers hopes their marriage will return to normal. But instead, they continue to drift apart. As divorce seems imminent, Myers decides to take revenge on the stranger he blames for the alienation of his wife’s affections. And while his wife has no idea who the man was, by an extraordinary coincidence Myers does: they went to college together, his name is Gray, and they were loosely acquainted.

VACATION opens as Meyers arrives at Gray’s doorstep. He finds the house empty and the mailbox full; his old friend is away. After a short email exchange, Meyers learns that Gray has planned a trip to South America and Meyers arranges to rendezvous with him on Corn Island in Nicaragua. He heads south to the tropics immediately.

It’s very odd that Gray, who hardly knows Meyers, isn’t more alarmed to see this figure from his past pop back into view and invite himself to Nicaragua. Although Gray himself isn’t aware of it, he has a massive brain tumor that has begun to affect his ability to think and act rationally. His doctor has contacted his ex-wife with the news, and she is desperately trying to locate him, but with no success – perhaps because it never occurs to her to send him an email asking what he’s up to.

Meyers is severely injured in an earthquake immediately upon his arrival in Nicaragua. He breaks several ribs and one arm, and has to spend most of his ready cash on hospital bills. Meanwhile, he’s been fired from his job due to his unexplained absence and the news has reached his wife – who, angered by her husband’s erratic behavior, cancels all his credit cards and leaves Meyers without any means to buy a return ticket home.

Completely stranded, Meyers uses the sixty dollars he has left to make his way cross-country to the largely deserted but beautiful Corn Island. Meanwhile, in the brief time Gray’s been gone his illness has escalated dramatically. He tries to make his way to Corn Island, but he dies – delirious and lost in Panama – before he can make it.

Meyers arrives on Corn Island and Gray isn’t there. He realizes that his wife has abandoned him, that he will probably never be able to exact his revenge, that he has no job, and no way to return to the United States. He commits suicide rather than face such a bleak future.

Meyers’ wife, stony-hearted until this point, mysteriously thaws. She knows her husband is headed to Corn Island and decides she’ll meet him there. Of course, she doesn’t arrive until after he’s died. When she asks the locals, they tell her they’ve never seen Meyers – though they all have, and do remember – and so his wife leaves in defeat, none the wiser. ( )

The novel offers that incredibly satisfying form of narrative arc in which characters' paths converge and diverge in unexpected ways, here across a thematically unified landscape of isolation, of "following from a distance," of wilderness. Meditative yet punchy prose explores the depressions and strange drives of stranded individuals. Witty introspective descriptions and dialogue. ( )

The Short of It:

Beautiful, rhythmic prose that begs to be read aloud. Vacation is a treat for the brain that’s gone soft (mine).

The Rest of It:

You know how you feel after missing the gym for say a month…or maybe even two months? You feel sort of sloggy and wonky and a bit out of sorts? Well, I’ve been feeling that way lately with my reading. Not saying that I didn’t enjoy the books, quite the opposite, but my brain needed a bit of stimulation. Something different to get the brainwaves firing again. Vacation did just that.

Myers and his wife have lived a decent life, but one night, Myers notices that his wife has gone missing. Turns out, that every evening around the same time, she becomes “absent.” She tells Myers that she needs to work late, but what he finds out, is that she spends her evenings following Gray, an old classmate of his. Myers immediately thinks the worst. In flashbacks we see how it used to be between them:

"She had touched his face when he was tired, when he had another bad day at the office. He remembered that, the way she used to do that, the way she expected nothing back, it was gentle. As nice as rain." (31)

Myers, determined to get even, decides to follow Gray as he treks across the world, but has this to say about his wife before he goes:

"She had arrived as one thing, and now, as he parted, she was another, some strange folded-up broken thing—and at last he had done nothing to stop it and at the most he had caused it all." (31)

What Myers doesn’t know is that his wife (who goes through the story without a name) has no idea who Gray is, and Gray has no idea who she is. They are complete strangers to one another. Myers decides to find Gray, who has left the country. He sends him friendly emails and the two get to know one another again. They decide to meet on Corn Island, so Myers packs his things and takes a “vacation.”

What Myers doesn’t know is that Gray is suffering from an inoperable brain tumor and has no idea where he is. So as Myers corresponds with Gray via email, the quest to find Gray becomes a bit of a joke. Additionally, Gray’s ex-wife is also looking for him and Gray’s daughter, who is really not his daughter, decides to seek out her true father who happens to be a dolphin un-trainer.

Wild, eh? This book is a roller-coaster of a ride. It takes you from one side of the world to another. There are natural disasters to contend with, dolphin rescues taking place, men struggling to find out who they really are, weird, island folk and cabbies with personality. It’s sounds like an awful lot to contend with, and it is, but it makes for one, satisfying read. ( )

This book is worth a read, if only for an unusual view of humanity. Everyone experiences it, but few people write about it successfully: human nature is a strange thing.

There are several narratives happening at once, and Ms. Unferth craftily slides back and forth between the three--perhaps four?--stories. I found her writing style mildly tiresome, because of her sometimes awkward blatancy, but I still feel that this book has value as a vignette of the more unusual side of silly humans. I think all of us will be able to identify with some aspect of the characters in the book. ( )

Vacation is the hilarious account of a husband on a journey to save his marriage. Myers knows something odd is going on with his wife, and to solve the mystery he's forced to take a vacation to seek answers even though he has no idea what he's looking for or where he's going. In its own distinctive style, Vacation bears witness to a raw and irrepressible human spirit.

Unferth is a genius at crafting perfect (and perfectly unusual) sentences. Each page is a treat. This excerpt, in which Myers describes what happens to the accumulated stuff when a couple breaks up, illustrates this story's unique blend of melancholy and humor:
"There were also the mirrors, the photos, and other inaccurate reflections. The razor, the bathtub. The kids and the dog, although they had none. The idea of dog, that. The possibility of dog that now would not be possible. Her mother, or her mother's dislike of him, who would get that? Surely that would come with him. Along with the rooster clock that she loved, that he hated, that she bought when she started to hate him."

Images of drowning are prevalent throughout Vacation, and Unferth masterfully transforms these desperate images into events of great beauty:
"A man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were wrapped in air and light."

Unfortunately, the primary story is disrupted by a sideshow involving a daughter seeking her dolphin-trainer father. This subplot is never resolved and becomes an unwanted distraction that should have been deleted during the editing process. Despite this imperfection, Vacation is entirely charming and well worth reading. ( )