FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Caribou IslandBy David Vann Penguin, 293pp. £8.99
SOMEHOW IRENE IS still married to Gary, a guy who has spent his life — and hers – indulging his crackpot dreams. He is not even a likable eccentric but is selfish and cruel in a cowardly, mean-minded way, blaming all of his failures on her. It is this everyday nastiness that lingers over Caribou Island. Yet the opening sequence of David Vann's second book appears to be setting the scene for a dramatic, mysterious narrative. Irene tells her daughter Rhoda about the day she found her mother, the grandmother Rhoda never met, "hanging from the rafters". Irene was 10 years old, and recalls that on finding her dead mother she had said, "I'm sorry." Rhoda is shocked, more by what Irene had said than by what she saw. Who wouldn't be?
This is a novel to be approached with some caution. Admirers of the at times interesting, if ultimately overrated, narrative sequence Legend of a Suicide(2008) will be anticipating something special. Others might be curious about how a young writer follows a promising piece of work that had been published quietly in the US before being hyped to the heights in the UK, admittedly as a paperback original. Vann has gained in narrative confidence; if the first book was an exercise in various tones and styles, this new novel has both narrative and stylistic cohesion.
It is almost rigidly well-structured; the story moves between the small set of characters, giving each their share of the spotlight, allowing, of course, that the central story rests most deliberately on the war of attrition that is the marriage of Gary and Irene, which took them from California to Alaska some 30 years earlier. Despite the vivid descriptions of the wonderful Alaskan scenery, it is also far closer to the fiction of Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody than to that of Cormac McCarthy or Tobias Wolff.
Gary and Irene’s children are grown. Rhoda, their daughter, who as a child once said hi to a grizzly bear, is the only unselfish character. Even so, she has a goal: to marry Jim, her cold but wealthy dentist boyfriend. But she cares about her parents and loves her mother.
Rhoda’s brother, Mark, rich on salmon fishing, is coarse but as happy as his homegrown pot can make him – and appears to live in a constant good humour. His girlfriend, Karen, is also perpetually high. Mark has no interest in his parents, and even when Irene begins to suffer from vicious headaches she refuses to drive a mile down the road to see how she is doing.
Vann ensures there is a great deal of dialogue. This is a busy novel; domestic realism with sufficient sitcom humour and bickering to balance the potential pathos of Irene’s past, never mind Rhoda’s function as a kindly Cassandra.
Into the immediate family situation saunters Monique, the unlikely girlfriend of the nervous Carl, a young hopeful who is in awe of her. The pair had backpacked to Alaska; Carl sleeps in a damp sleeping bag at a campsite while Monique, a spoilt child of wealth, seeks somewhere more comfortable. She catches the already roving eye of Jim, who fears that marrying safe, reliable Rhoda might spoil his chances of excitement. His concerns about a reliable, dull wife mirror the angry regrets of Gary, who feels cheated.
When Monique demands a helicopter tour, Jim obliges and realises when gazing at the majesty of the great glacier that “Rhoda should see this, too. She’d grown up basically at the foot of the glacier, but it was around the corner a bit, not quite visible from the lake, and even if she’d seen it on hikes, he was sure she hadn’t seen it like this”.
Jim’s betrayal is sordid and then becomes almost comic when Rhoda innocently invites Monique and Carl to supper and a stay-over. Rhoda studies Monique, deciding that “she was tall and kind of glamorous, in a way, though she had a weird little nose. Like an elf whose body had grown too big. Carl was out of his league, though, insecure and hopeless. Rhoda gave their relationship another few weeks at most.” Rhoda watches and reacts; she is the only character capable of thinking beyond herself.
It is obvious where the narrative is going. In Gary, Vann has created a detached husband and uninterested father whose thoughts invariably return to the Anglo-Saxon epics he studied and the thesis he never completed. Gary is intent on building a log cabin on Caribou Island. His efforts to bring building materials there by boat with only Irene for help are comic, and Vann uses the situation effectively as a way into examining all the ancient hurts festering between the couple. The storm scenes are brilliant; even better are the various cabin-building sequences and the shockingly graphic episode at the cannery, in which a powerful polemic is cleverly pitched beneath some hideously manic comedy. Vann also underlines the brutality of salmon fishing on the surreal scale at which it is carried out in places like Alaska.
At times it is difficult to accept that these depressed, resentful middle-aged people would respond in such an elemental way to their crisis. Irene wonders at her life yet is never particularly sympathetic, nor quite convincing, although her resentments are. Vann draws on big themes and has a splendid landscape. Much of the comedy is cheap and intended to deflect from the vicious exchanges between Gary and Irene. If there is a real tragedy in this novel, it is the dilemma of Rhoda. There are echoes of Legend of a Suicidethroughout, plus variations of themes such as the vain attempt to find solace in nature. But are the characters also variations; are Jim the dentist and Rhoda younger versions of the Jim and Rhoda in the earlier book?
Caribou Islandis competent and cohesive. Admirers of Franzen will enjoy it. But far more important is the confidence it reveals. David Vann had a huge and unexpected success with his first book; in writing this, a popular rather than profound second work, he has weathered that and moved forward.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
