Ten Years Later: Reading Laura van den Berg’s Timeless Classic, The Isle of Youth

A decade ago, I wanted to be known for writing. I dropped out of massage school, couldn’t get into college, and began taking online writing courses through adult education programs. We read Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore. You know the list, and I bet you too heard the common wisdom: read everything. All this brought me to Laura van den Berg’s The Isle of Youth , the first collection that existed ready in my mind as I read it, a book so cool and mysterious I recognized it as kin, despite the fact that I was a gay San Diego stoner who warped the pages with the Pacific and ashed into the binding. The fact that the author herself was young and innovative guided my ambition unlike the other dead greats. The opening story, “I Looked for You, I Called Your Name,” was my favorite. Honeymooners crash land in Patagonia, enduring a catastrophic vacation. The narrator becomes estranged and disturbed by her husband’s reactions to each accident, leading her to act mysteriously and searchingly, watching a woman swim in the ocean at night before stuffing her own mouth full of sand. Finally, fire overtakes the hotel on the last night. The narrator’s surface quiescence is betrayed by her risky private actions, and staged gorgeously by van den Berg’s use of contrasting settings, like her brief description of the Iguazú falls: “Water poured over two massive cliffs and pooled in a huge expanse speckled with mossy rocks, as though a lush island had just been overtaken by a flood. And then there was the sound, the deep rushing noise that burned away the confusion and the worry.” Many of her characters keep animating secrets from the people who love them. A wife had a twin, once. A private investigator with an incarcerated father and derelict mother seeks out danger. Following her brother’s explosive death in an Antarctic research station, a woman attempts to understand why he died, and if his missing wife’s secrets played a role. A twin disappears into a criminal life in the Isle of […]

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