On the fault line between the American dream and reality

Melanie McGrath10 April 2012
Caribou Island
by David Vann
(Penguin, £8.99)

David Vann's 2009 story collection, Legend of a Suicide, propelled him into the top rank of American literary boy wonders. This latest, a novel, shares with that earlier collection both its Alaskan setting and its gloomy outlook.

Caribou Island is the story of a marital breakdown told from the points of view of the players, their grown children and the children's respective partners. What emerges is an ensemble piece, a patchwork of narratives with Gary and Irene's rocky marriage at its core.

Former academic Gary and retired teacher Irene are making one last attempt at reconciliation by retreating to a remote island in the middle of a lake. First, they must build the log cabin they intend to live in, but the project is little more than a displacement activity, doomed from the start by the couple's opposing rationales for undertaking it. Gary, for whom marriage and fatherhood, by forcing him into the role of principal breadwinner, represented "an early death of self and possibility", is reaching for a bigger, more authentic life. For Irene, her husband's project is nothing more than an "expression of despair a sign that Gary hadn't found a way to fit into his real life", but she's playing along, convinced that any refusal will be seen by Gary as an excuse for a divorce. Having been abandoned as a child after her mother's suicide, Irene is determined not to be "passed around, unwanted" ever again.

Not surprisingly, the building of the cabin proves a headache, literally for Irene, who soon develops a mysterious migraine, which alarms grown-up daughter Rhoda, interrupting her somewhat over-optimistic plans to marry creepy but well-heeled dentist Jim, and foreshadowing the grim and slightly lurid events of the novel's finale. A bleak marital drama is lightened, if you could call it that, with episodes of dark sex comedy.

Men do not come off well in this novel, though Vann is quite capable of sticking it to his female characters too. All human frailty - vanity, self-delusion, selfishness and the rest - is here, illuminated by Vann's hallmark technique of writing several points of view in a single scene, the literary equivalent of turning over stones the better to examine the creepy-crawlies writhing beneath.

But the over-arching presence in this novel is the character of Alaska itself. Alaska is what makes this novel a truly American work, and not simply in the most obvious way but also because in Western literature, at least, only the American writer, more especially the male American writer, still grapples closely with all that wilderness represents; the fault line between the rugged promises of the American Dream and the windswept, mud-sunk, mosquito-laden reality. Vann's spare, incisive, craggy prose is wonderfully suited to descriptions of this, America's last frontier, and the place of "dreams that never happened, or happened only briefly". His penchant for the word "tromping" and an odd habit of eliding the verb "to be" occasionally irritate, but there's no question that Vann is a gifted stylist as well as a meticulous observer of human relationships.

Caribou Island is a beautiful, richly atmospheric if unsettling novel, and deserves to consolidate Vann's position among America's literary high flyers.

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