This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara, 2018
The magic trick:
Mixing destruction and comedy
I know we just did a Vauhini Vara weekend double in April, but I’m enjoying her story collection, This Is Salvaged, so much I figured we could go back to the well.
Today’s feature, the title track, is probably my favorite of hers that I’ve read. It tells the story of Marlon, a charlatan artist who has left his wife to build a replica of Noah’s Ark, using labor from the unhoused population of Seattle and money from interested evangelical Christians.
It’s a very funny story. So funny in fact I often felt like Marlon was Ignatius Reilly’s spiritual cousin and this was a strange chapter from a Confederacy Of Dunces’ universe.
What’s remarkable is that the story could be so funny and have pathos. For as comedic as the Marlon character is, he also hurts people. You’re disgusted by him as often as you are amused.
It’s indicative of the entire Salvaged collection, I think – this ability to mix destruction with comedy – but especially so in this excellent story.
And that’s quite a trick on Vara’s part.
The selection:
On the first morning at the shipyard, Marlon overturned a crate and stepped up onto it. He meant to introduce himself to the rest of them and say a couple of words about what he proposed. He immediately felt awkward and fraudulent, as if he were trying to place himself above them. He hunched and kept the speech simple—unpretentious, he hoped. He told them who he was, and what he was there for, and he listed the specifications. “The King James Bible calls for gopher wood and pitch,” Marlon said. Historians disagreed about what gopher wood was, he told them, but a common guess was cedar, so that’s what they would use. A great mound of cedar planks was piled against the back wall of the warehouse. “The pitch is from a Swedish supplier,” he said, gesturing at a dozen steel vats in the corner of the warehouse. He’d made one modern concession: a steel frame. In the days of Noah, the ark would have been built plank-first, without a frame at all—the cedar set down board by board and hand-joined with pins of iron or wood. “The plan is,” he concluded, “we finish by wintertime, when the rainy season starts.” They’d moor the ark just as the first grey clouds settled in.
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