How, voyager?

UNRAVEL GUIDE Unferth sends her protagonist on a pointless quest.

Photograph: Sasha Benjamin

For most people, traveling is supposed to be a time of personal rejuvenation and general R&R—a period when you shouldn’t have to do anything more strenuous than order a frozen margarita. Deb Olin Unferth’s inventive debut novel, Vacation, turns that idea on its head. Her characters might visit foreign beaches and linger in Internet cafes, but they are primarily careening into existential crisis. Though the book features multiple intertwined story lines, it focuses on a man named Myers, who undertakes a manic quest through Central America looking for a man who he thinks has seduced his wife. Instead, he finds earthquakes, dodges aggressive Christian missionaries and gets stuck with a group of awkward vacationers. Along for the ride, the reader quickly begins to wonder if this unhinged man’s sanity is intact.

“There is something deeply lonely about being a tourist,” the 37-year-old Unferth, who splits time between Kansas and New York, tells TONY over coffee in the East Village. “It’s also kind of inherently obnoxious. You go around staring at people, you feel like you’re intruding, and I tried to capture that.” Vacation belongs to a long tradition of literature about excursions gone awry, and Unferth says that she was influenced by novelist Paul Bowles’s 1949 Sahara death trip, The Sheltering Sky. Still, she felt that his off-the-map story was impossible to re-create in this era of hypercommercialized tourism. “There was something that Bowles was able to do then that is much more difficult to do now,” she says. “Today, it’s much harder to get truly lost.”

Though Unferth doesn’t write much about uncharted geographical territory, her book excels at exploring the remote reaches of her characters’ psyches. “It may feel like Myers is running away from his wife, but really he just ends up looking deeper and deeper into what destroyed the marriage,” explains the author. “He’s not getting away from her at all.” Other characters in the book experience similar journeys: Spoke, an expat whom Myers meets in the Nicaraguan Granada, is a wanderer who is just confronting the fact that he no longer belongs anywhere.

Vacation’s point of view shifts frequently, and the alternating voices have the unsettling effect of keeping the reader, like the characters, on unsteady ground. And yet the author manages to weave these diverging narratives into a coherent story. “I listened to Bach’s fugues over and over, some more than a hundred times, trying to understand how to create something like that on the page,” the author says. “The beauty of it for me is the way a piece can build, gain momentum, with all of those voices working together.”

Unferth manages to inject some humor into her chorus of crisis. At one point, Myers caves in and goes on a sightseeing excursion with several annoying Christians (they convince him to go by saying that it will be a “secular walk”). Naturally, the first stop is an old church. “I was really careful not to make Myers a sightseer, because that’s not what he was there for,” asserts the author. “He had a mission, but I still wanted to embrace the absurdity of tourists.”

But in the end, Vacation’s farcical moments are detours on its journey through personal hells. McSweeney’s Books, Unferth’s publisher, has long been characterized as a haven for literary jokesters, but as recent publications such as Dave Eggers’s What Is the What? and Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital suggest, the press has been infusing its imaginative leaps with more-somber themes. Vacation fits snugly in the young press’s less-whimsical second wave. “I think it’s a really sad book,” asserts Unferth. “People just looking for something cute probably won’t enjoy it that much.” In the end, Myers understands that he will never find the man he’s looking for, and that if he does, it won’t do anything to fix his problems with his wife. But Unferth has him continue on his pointless journey anyway. “I wanted to express that moment when someone acts passionately and does something even though they know it’s irrational,” the author says. “There is something beautiful and dangerous in that.”

Vacation (McSweeney’s Books, $22) is out now.

Buy Vacation now on BN.com