An author more haunted by paternal amputation would be difficult to imagine. A sadder book about fathers and sons would be impossible to imagine. ...
In the novella, "Sukkwan Island," the powerful and supremely vexing centerpiece of the collection, Roy and his father make a final attempt at reconciliation. The father has bought a cabin in the Alaska wilderness with the intent of spending a year there with his son, homesteading and living off the land. The first half of the novella is narrated from Roy's close third-person perspective, the second half from the father's. In the first few pages Vann shows the reader an unassuming set of rustic implements: some rope, a few screws, a battery. By the story's end the rope has become a noose, the screws have been driven into the reader's fingernails, and the battery is wired someplace unspeakable. ...
The reportorial relentlessness of Vann's imagination often makes his fiction seem less written than chiseled. One cannot say that Vann does not do humor well because - here, at least - he does not do humor at all. What he does do well is despair and desperation. In spite (or maybe because) of this, he leads the reader to vital places. A small, lovely book has been written out of his large and evident pain. "A father, after all," Vann writes, "is a lot for a thing to be." A son is also a lot for a thing to be; so is an artist. With "Legend of a Suicide," David Vann proves himself a fine example of both.
- Tom Bissell, The New York Times
"Sukkwan Island" contains not a single wrong note, and makes most other modern fiction seem anaemic and insubstantial by comparison... It is the shape of Vann's prose which continually astonishes. This is the sort of book which can be opened at random and devoured simply for the rhythm and stark beauty of its sentences. ... "Legend of a Suicide" marks the fictional debut of a truly great writer.
- The Irish Sunday Independent
I could not prevent my wandering mind from noting the coincidences with last year's suicide of the Alaskan ichthyologist, Nicholas Hughes (son of poet Sylvia Plath, another suicide), whose starry literary family also had its share of mental illness observed by children. ... (All) good writers, as opposed to all readers, try through some alchemy to turn these impulses into something aesthetically useful. I've not seen more careful and luminous narrative art made from them than in Vann's novel. At least not in a long time.
- Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker