If I feel the need to compose a brutally honest review, I prefer to start with the good, wherever possible. To that end, I rarely broke stride while reading David Vann's "Last Day On Earth". It was genuinely captivating, and Vann's rather unique - if presumptuous - approach to the narrative made the life and death of Steven Kazmierczak feel very personal to me. I think this is an achievement worth noting, given that there are absolutely no images to accompany the interior text - something readers have come to expect and possibly depend upon in this genre, often to their detriment.
That said, this subset of non-fiction (i.e., true crime, and not the lurid, tabloid variety) requires a rigor and a restraint that Vann does not possess, even in tiny amounts. Writing about real events - and more importantly, real people - carries an enormous weight of responsibility. Vann's writing makes it simultaneously clear that he feels more than confident he is up to the task, when in actuality, he is anything but.
This could stem from the fact that this is an Esquire article that grew into a slim book. The narrative required to capture the fleeting interest of a magazine reader lends itself to conjecture, gossip, distortions and sweeping generalizations, all for the sake of keeping the reader from tossing the disposable periodical aside.
Vann was apparently tapped to write the article by Esquire due to the critical success of his (mostly) autobiographical novel on his father's suicide, entitled "Legend Of A Suicide: Stories". (I read this just prior to "Last Day On Earth", and after a short respite, I'll soon read Vann's novel, "Dirt".) This book is described by the publisher as "the most complete portrait we have of any school shooter", which is a distant cry from the truth.
As a reader, I found the book to be at least as revealing about Vann himself, and in ways he almost certainly did not intend. Vann does intend for the reader to come to know him, as he injects himself and his personal history into the text frequently and awkwardly. It's not that his own history has no place of merit in the decision to write the story of Steven Kazmierczak; it does. But that place would've been much more appropriately relegated to observations and sentiments confined to an introduction and an epilogue. However, to do so would've limited Vann's deep desire to 'riff' on his subjects, his perceptions of people who were interviewed and people who were not, his opinions on things with which he admittedly hasn't an iota of experience...but won't hesitate to present himself as an authority, both in text and in tone.
I can't count the number of times I laughed aloud in incredulousness over the arrogance, the cheek! - of this author. Vann truly believes - based on nothing more than his own opinion - that he correctly deduced the day Kazmierczak decided to commit the mass shooting at NIU! (I'll bet the FBI would be able to put that superlative mind of Mr. Vann's to excellent use - imagine the advantages a team of crime-solvers would have with him in their arsenal!) He has robust feelings on the subject of medication for depression (which he's never taken), speculations that multiple ATF reports were illegally altered based solely on his opinions about a 'more likely' rifle Kazmierczak would've surely carried, racism and racists, violence as a predictable result of first-person shooter video games, the U.S. military, popular music and a deep and obvious antipathy for religion.
The use of the phrase "only God knows" and the word "immaculate" in two separate communications - both utterly unrelated to religion or matters of faith - Kazmierczak had with two separate people over time is, in Vann's opinion, evidence that Kazmierczak is unwittingly returning to the guilt-ridden Catholic roots of his mother. In addition, we learn that his (horrible, in Vann's opinion) mother was on the fleshy side and liked horror movies, and she struggled and (gasp!) made mistakes in trying to cope with her son's mental illness over the years. For this and little else, Vann happily indicts a woman who can't possibly defend herself - she died approximately 16 months before the NIU shooting took place. Multiple other people are admonished roundly with nothing more than the author's say-so.
The author obviously takes the words of certain interviewees as Gospel (Whoops! Sorry, Mr. Vann proclaims his atheism pointedly in the book and might bristle at my choice of words!) while discounting and denigrating the statements of others. The author notes the wide discrepancies in the survivors' witness accounts over certain details, but it doesn't seem to occur to him that the memories of every person Kazmierczak knew will, inevitably, be inaccurate and incomplete in one way or another. He reserves a special vitriol for Jessica Baty, without ever fully explaining why - or better yet, not allowing his personal impression of an interviewee to come into play, at all.
I also question many of the statements presented by the author as facts: how, for instance, does Vann know that Kazmierczak slammed his childhood pet into the wall of the shed when (according to the book) no one was there to witness it that day? This is but one example of sloppy writing - when it comes to an account of real-life events, the reader should know the sources for documenting events of note. My guess is that he conjectured that it happened that day because an interviewee said he'd seen Kazmierczak abuse the dog in the past, but does that give the author license to create scenarios and present them as plain fact? How does the author know about supposed sexual encounters with men - did it come from police reports? Medical files? Interviews with a specific person? We don't know. We are told early on that Vann had unprecedented access to the complete, 1,500 page case file and thereafter given absolutely NO background about the wellspring of all kinds of pertinent information. Without that, how can any responsible reader not question the veracity of many of these claims? Telling me you had access to the case file and leaving it at that is simply not good enough. It is my opinion that Vann chose to avoid writing the story in a substantiated, disciplined fashion so as to allow for his personal feelings and invective to take center stage.
Vann weaves outrageous statements throughout the narrative, including doozies like these:
"In the Army, Steve's not supposed to question anything. If you think about right or wrong, if you worry about morality or ethics or who you are or who they are, this could slow your trigger finger. It could break the chain of command. It could get your buddies killed, and it's mutiny, treason, traitorous. Don't think. Just kill when you're ordered to kill."
"Cho killed thirty-two people, wounded another twenty-three, then killed himself before police arrived. The deadliest rampage by a single gunman in U. S. history, and the whole thing was just stupid. There's nothing cool or interesting about Cho's 'methodology.' Buy a Glock 19, buy some extra clips, walk up to a classroom and shoot people. We still have nothing in place to stop anyone from doing this. It's an American right."
"The reference to God is interesting, too. It's less than five months now until his shooting, and Steve is reverting back to who he was in junior high, his mother and her Catholicism a part of that." (This, in reference to an apology note Kazmierczak wrote wherein he writes near the end of the note, "I am ashamed that this happened, but only God knows why it happened.")
"The word immaculate must reach back somehow to his mother, to that Catholic upbringing." (This, in reference to Kazmierczak pondering in an e-mail, "What is the perfect, most immaculate life attainable by someone?" As if non-Catholics don't use the word 'immaculate', too?)
"Like many other racists, Steve and Kelly don't know they're racist, don't realize how often they threaten violence, and are distracted by sex."
"As idiotic as it sounds, this is the real basis for the pro-gun lobby in America: right-wing libertarian paranoia that the federal government wants to enslave all its citizens and needs to take their guns away first before enacting the evil plan. I would just laugh and shrug it off, but this is a major force in mainstream American politics. How can that be? Who are we?"
This small book is more of a personal diatribe than a well-researched look into the life of someone who did the unspeakable. That's not to say it isn't an engrossing read, especially once Vann finally abandons his own paltry history in favor of Steven Kazmierczak in the weeks and days leading up to February 14, 2008. What I find more fascinating, however, was seeing the author's own prejudices, presumptions, apriorisms, suspicions, biases and affinities on full-frontal display. But beware the near-omniscient tone and obvious liberties the author has taken in providing detail to events he could not possibly have known to be fact.
This book does not meet even basic standards for non-fiction, much less one that purports to tell an important story in which real people were wounded beyond repair. The author should stick to fiction and memoirs if he wants to insert himself into the narrative and twist it to his liking.
