Through each meticulously recounted and narrowly focused chapter, the story comes into whole, culminating into a complete object by the final lines. He is a storyteller, telling stories to himself, the players of his games, and to the reader. He is honest about his inability to recollect clearly in the way that memory is fluid and fallible. His omissions are overt and commented upon. Early on, a child says to Sean “You’re a fibber” in response to a truthful, yet incomprehensible answer. I didn’t want to read that story - the psychopathic anti-hero, though the story at first flags that it might go there.
Sean initially appears to be an unreliable narrator, and I was initially concerned that he may be the Wolf of the title: something uncontained, purely malicious.
The novel works in a way that makes everything in the previous paragraph seem like a spoiler. He supplements the insurance payments for his rent and care with the small income he receives as gamemaster of several mail-in role-playing games, the most popular of which is called “Trace Italian”. Sean lives alone but requires regular medical assistance. Wolf in White Van is a memoir told by Sean Phillips, a man horribly disfigured in his teenage years in an event referred to vaguely at first and then more specifically later, the narrative circling the traumatic episode like a drain. Given this penchant for long form storytelling, and the pinprick precision which makes his best songs function as short stories, it's less surprising that the Mountain Goats' frontman would write a novel than that it took him so long to do so. One of my favourite American pieces of writing, told not in prose but as an asequential song cycle over several albums. You might be thinking of Raymond Carver or Denis Johnson, but this is pure John Darnielle.
Through the bad times and then through the worse times, sticking around solely out of spite for each other, until it abruptly ends. Ever heard of the Alpha couple? Their story spans across years and across the continental United States: drinking buddies turned lovers, two dysfunctional addicts cause each other ruin, first unintentionally, then gleefully.
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