Fire At the End of the Rainbow, the first book by Shawn Vandor, is a poised and unusual performance, an autobiography made of very brief chapters which eschew the typical surreality of short prose forms in favor of a less experimental, more vernacular directness. It begins with jokey pieces about men confronting men, but steadily gets grave, until the violence—and the critique of masculinity—becomes extreme. In the story Man of the House, Vandor bickers with the father of a friend about where to take a shower: the bathroom, or outside on the new back deck, where the weather is uncomfortably cold, and the fight, although trivial at first, grows unbearably intense. Later, in Man of the House II, Vandor endures a dinner at the home of actor Michael Madsen, a threatening and unpredictable man who almost hits the narrator and just quickly offers him a movie deal. In Subway Ride, Vandor sees a man beat the crap out of his girlfriend; in You Look Nice Tonight, a female friend describes how she was humped on public transportation by a stranger, an anecdote that ends ambiguously when Vandor discovers his own manhood poking from his shorts. In the title story, his mother’s boyfriend chokes her after a miscarriage, “…like a million men before him throughout all time.”

Vandor seems the prisoner of a useless, almost dangerous vulnerability, and undergoes humiliations worse than those endured by other people, as when, for example, he shits his pants in the company of his dream girl and her father in a motorboat, or when a middle-school classmate named Jill seduces him and then kicks him in the balls. Nearly every passage comes down to a gendered battle for dignity, and he emerges from this youth both ambivalent—often juggling several girlfriends at once—and impulsive to the point of liability—moving back and forth across the country to be with women who don’t seem interested in him. The Shawn Vandor of Fire At the End of the Rainbow is an extremely complicated literary creation, and while the book provokes a long and fierce analysis of him, it does not leave him reduced by diagnosis, a considerable achievement for an autobiographical work.

Vandor’s technique is clear, concise, often funny, but never desperate for laughs, and exhibits the same perplexed, defensive reticence as his character. He would like to leave the reader troubled, and doesn’t nervously over-entertain or end on strange, obliquely evasive notes. He is forthrightly ambivalent. He lets a girlfriend cry in his arms without knowing how to comfort her, because “…I was too far away from myself and I didn’t know how to get back,” and he feels nonplussed toward the advances from a gorgeous woman named MaDora, asking “Where’s the mystery? Where’s the suspense?” as though he prefers the uncertainty of courtship to actual fucking, and loneliness to intimacy. As the title suggests, the book ends, not with a solution, but a permanent state of mind.

Fair or not, first books are not often noted for their control. Fire At the End of the Rainbow is uncommonly accomplished and harrowing.

Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.

Photograph by Stephen Rose