Black Tank by Wade Prull

Black Tank arrives disguised as one kind of book and turns out to be another, and the turn is the whole experience of reading it.

For its first half this reads as a study of a working life gone wrong. A former infrastructure engineer, twenty-two years in water systems, sits with the consequences of a career built from small concessions: a memo he wrote, a lunch he was taken to, an NDA he signed and the money he accepted. There is something of Willy Loman in him, an ageing American professional who cannot separate what he did for a living from who he became. Prull seems to know it. Asked directly what he used to do, the narrator says he was in sales.

The whole present-day action takes place over thirty-nine minutes, while this man empties the waste tank of his motorhome at a state park dump station. Everything else happens inside a mind that processes grief, guilt and self-deception through the vocabulary of pressure vessels and operating tolerances. The chapter epigraphs, presented as maintenance advice for holding tanks, let the book state its truths plainly while the narrator keeps filing them elsewhere. It is controlled, distinctive voice work, and there is a scene involving a technician at a fence beside a school playground that is as good as anything I have read this year.

Then the book shows you what it has actually been about, and it is horrific. I will not spoil it. I had spent a long time inhabiting this man with real sympathy, and watching it play out left me thoroughly unsettled, which I take to be the intention.

Where it lost me is what it wants from the reader afterwards. The closing movement is built as a kind of grace: the narrator stops running, allows himself to be found, and the prose lifts into something that reads as arrival. I understood that I was being invited to feel a flicker of pride in him for staying. I could not. What he did sits far outside anything the situation required, and the book never fully reckons with that gap. The act itself is kept deliberately unnamed, described only as something his hands did while he watched, so the reader is asked to accept a great deal on the word of the one person who most needs it to be survivable. There may be a truer and colder explanation sitting in the subtext, something about a man who could bear exposure but not being seen clearly by his own wife. If so, Prull leaves it there, unexamined, and lets the ending do emotional work the middle has not paid for.

I finished it feeling as though I had missed something, and I am still not certain whether the fault is mine or the book's. That uncertainty is worth four stars on its own. This is an ambitious, tightly controlled piece of writing that has stayed with me for days, and readers who like literary fiction that withholds will find a great deal here to argue with.