Nathan Leslie's novel, Van Boyle, traces the life of its titular protagonist in reverse chronological order, beginning with his death from pneumonia at age 69 in a Maryland hospital and concluding with his conception. Once a Major League Baseball player for the Baltimore Orioles, Van's promising career ends with a devastating knee injury in his mid-twenties. Unable to transition to life after baseball, he experiences financial ruin through bad investments and embezzlement by his financial advisor, the dissolution of his marriage to Cheryl, and complete estrangement from his children.
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| Van Boyle by Nathan Leslie |
The novel documents Van's two-decade descent into homelessness across rural Maryland, where he survives by foraging, living in abandoned vehicles and structures, and relying on temporary shelter from acquaintances. Throughout, Van refuses assistance even when offered, unable to ask for help or maintain the relationships that might sustain him. His emotional unavailability—present even during his marriage—deepens into radical isolation.
As the narrative moves backward through his baseball career, his marriage, failed business ventures, and increasingly troubled childhood, it gradually reveals the origins of Van's self-destructive patterns. His father's physical and psychological abuse taught Van that his worth depended entirely on athletic performance, that vulnerability invited violence, and that love was always conditional. These lessons, reinforced by the demands of professional sports and American capitalism's equation of human value with productivity, leave Van unable to conceive of himself as having worth beyond what he can achieve. The reverse chronology transforms the reading experience into an archaeological excavation, revealing how childhood trauma and social abandonment compound across a lifetime to produce a tragedy that appears, in retrospect, devastatingly inevitable.
Temporality and Heidegger's Being-Toward-Death
The reverse chronological structure is more than formal experimentation—it enacts a philosophical argument about how we construct meaning from existence. Where Heidegger proposed that authentic being requires acknowledging our mortality, Leslie inverts this: we know Van's death from the opening pages, and every subsequent moment becomes weighted with inevitability. The reader experiences what Heidegger called "thrownness"—the sense of being cast into circumstances not of our choosing—but in reverse. We watch Van thrown backward through time into increasingly constrained possibilities.
This structure also mirrors the phenomenology of trauma, where past events continually intrude on present consciousness. Van's homelessness, failed relationships, and knee injury don't emerge from nowhere; they're overdetermined by childhood abuse that we only gradually discover. The novel suggests that understanding a life requires archaeological excavation rather than linear narrative.
The Ethics of Recognition and Social Death
From a Levinasian perspective, Van's trajectory represents a catastrophic failure of ethical recognition. Levinas argued that ethics begins in the face-to-face encounter with the Other, who makes a fundamental claim on our responsibility. Yet Van repeatedly experiences what sociologists call "social death"—the denial of personhood. As a homeless man, he becomes invisible, his dignity eroded by economic precarity and social stigma.
The novel documents systematic ethical failures at multiple levels: his father's abuse, his teammates' indifference, the social welfare system's inadequacy, and society's criminalization of homelessness. Even Van's own children cannot bear to see him. The text asks: what obligations do we bear toward those whom society has rendered invisible? Van's insistence that he is "not homeless" but rather makes "home where I can" represents a desperate assertion of selfhood against erasure.
Psychoanalysis and Repetition Compulsion
The reverse structure reveals patterns invisible in forward chronology. Van's self-sabotage—walking away from financial opportunities, alienating those who care for him, choosing isolation—appears throughout his life. Freud's concept of repetition compulsion illuminates this: trauma survivors unconsciously recreate traumatic situations in an attempt to master them. Van's father's abuse and manipulation establish templates that Van cannot escape.
The novel's final sections, depicting abuse in infancy and early childhood, recontextualize everything preceding. Van's difficulty with intimacy, his relationship with his own children, his attraction to isolation—all bear the imprint of violated boundaries and corrupted trust. The text refuses to offer redemption or transcendence; instead, it documents how trauma propagates across a lifetime.
The Failure of American Meritocracy
Van's story indicts the mythology of American individualism. He achieves what should represent success—professional baseball, business ownership—yet ends destitute. His trajectory reveals how precarious success is within capitalism, particularly for those without inherited wealth or social capital. The Handler's embezzlement, bad investments, and medical debt compound to produce economic ruin.
Moreover, Van's physical body—his knee—becomes the site where biological vulnerability intersects with economic necessity. Under capitalism, the body is capital, and injury means obsolescence. Van's worth as a person becomes inseparable from his productive capacity. When that capacity fails, society abandons him.
Masculinity, Vulnerability, and Silence
Van embodies damaged masculinity—stoic, emotionally inarticulate, unable to seek help. His father models masculinity through domination and abuse, teaching Van that vulnerability invites violence. This shapes Van's relationships: his inability to connect with his wife Cheryl, his estrangement from his children, his refusal of assistance even when desperate.
The novel suggests that patriarchal masculinity produces not strength but fragility—men so afraid of appearing weak that they destroy themselves rather than accept support. Van's homelessness becomes the logical endpoint of masculine self-sufficiency taken to its extreme: radical isolation.
Conclusion: The Ethics of Bearing Witness
Van Boyle ultimately raises questions about literature's ethical function. By structuring the narrative backward from death, Leslie forces readers to witness a life that society deemed expendable. We cannot look away or dismiss Van as simply another "bum." We know too much: his hopes, his wounds, his humanity.
The novel refuses easy answers or redemption arcs. Van dies as he lived—alone, in pain, estranged. Yet the act of narrating his life, of documenting each degradation and small grace, constitutes a form of ethical recognition. Leslie suggests that bearing witness to suffering—truly seeing those rendered invisible—may be literature's most vital social function, even when witnessing cannot prevent or redeem that suffering.
