John Darnielle is one of my favorite musicians and songwriters. His songs helped me get through college, and I can always listen to his work if I want something catchy, emotional, and more than most other music, powerful. When I heard he would be writing a book, I was ecstatic: my favorite works by him tell stories (see: Tallahassee), and most of his songs are about an individual or group and the trials and tribulations they face. I felt like a novel would be a perfect continuation of this skill, and a way for Darnielle to tell a story that is more detailed and, hopefully, even more affecting as a result. Furthermore, I had read his previous work, Master of Reality, and while I don't remember too much from it, I remember feeling like it was an effective piece of fiction and being able to identify with it. 
 Wolf in White Van is interesting because for all of its pretense of plot structure, it basically has none. This book doesn't tell a single story that has a beginning, middle, and end. Rather, it tells a multitude of stories from one man's life in a somewhat disconnected way, with threads dropped, picked up, alluded to, and sometimes left without finishing. It's kind of like a concept album, though in the Dark Side of the Moon sense, not the Tommy sense (or, for more relevant examples, in the We Shall All Be Healed sense than the Tallahassee sense). 
 The main character, Sean Phillips, suffered a horrible incident in his past and as a result has a very scarred face. He lives his life maintaining a play-by-mail role playing game called Trace Italian. Through the course of the book, we learn about his past, his family, his life, the game, and his imagination, and by the end, the connection I felt with the character was deep, but also different. 
 Whenever I finish a book, I try to write a lot about it. This is partly because I often enjoy the book, and want others to experience it as well. However, it is also partly purely selfish, and an opportunity to write about myself and my own life in a context that is not totally allegorical but also not completely truthful. A review is the rare kind of writing that lets me talk freely about myself but in a way that is also somewhat constructive. 
 (To be fair, I would not call any of my reviews "great" reviews. They lack not only an artistic sense which allows the writer to express themselves elegantly and attractively, but also the insight to place the work in its proper social or historical contexts and make some points that can transcend the singular figure of the reviewer.) 
 (I would like to get better about both of those points, but for now, I enjoy the freedom that a review gives me to write about myself and try to elucidate personal feelings, which I generally do not do.) 
 I'm never completely satisfied with my reviews and how I articulate myself in them, however, as it often seems like I'm missing some aspect of my thoughts: some crucial point that I know deep down but can't articulate, sometimes because I prevent myself from doing so, other times because I don't consciously know what that point is. 
 Wolf in White Van doesn't give the reader all the clues. You don't end up with a clear sense of what Sean's state of mind is, nor with any sense of what he was thinking in the past. All you get are the facts, and if you're lucky, a poetic line or two once in a while that seems to hint at some fundamental truth about Sean. Darnielle has said in the past that he doesn't like giving away the deeper meaning of all of his lyrics, and this tendency carries on to this book. 
 Of course, being obscure about characters' emotions is not a new trick. Everyone does it to varying degrees. However, given that the book is solely concerned with Sean's state of mind in the past, present, and future, it is noteworthy that the obscurity is so present and never goes away. What this lack of information did to me is that it made the book's main takeaway a state of mind rather than any concrete lesson, or even feeling. I felt confused and unsure about everything; like I wanted to think more deeply about my own state of mind, while knowing that expressing any part of those thoughts would be impossible. 
 I will say, though, that every time I flipped back to a previous page, which happened somewhat frequently given the structure of the book, I gained new insights. Facts that seemed inconsequential at the time seemed to leap out and gain new significance. This seems to suggest that maybe the book isn't obscure and that all of the meaning that one could want from the book is lying there in plain sight, just not in the way one might expect. 
 As a result, I will probably read this book again, and I would not be surprised if I enjoyed it more. This is a really fascinating book because it tries to examine a single person's mindset but does so in a very uncertain way. It isn't always gripping or thrilling, and as I said above, left me with more of a "state of mind" than a "feeling," which makes me unable to give it really high marks, but is certainly worth reading if only for the unique perspective and subject matter, not to mention Sean Phillips himself.