‘Island’ has its peaks and valleys

January 20, 2011|Max Winter

When writing about landscapes, David Vann writes with a poetry born of connectedness, of deep observation. When building his story, he shows a sharp intuition for dynamic jump-cuts and disjuncture. When writing about people, his intuition fails him, and we cannot suspend enough disbelief to care about their plights. Which is unfortunate, because his characters’ plights are serious and, if handled better, would have made for a truly devastating novel.

The fully described, if not fully realized, characters in “Caribou Island’’ are connected to each other through blood, family ties, marriage, or rage; the novel tests and explores these ties as it develops, and yet in the process we don’t necessarily learn much about them. Gary, a long-failed doctoral student, has lived off the Alaskan land for many years, and he is building a log cabin with his reluctant, resentful, and unenthusiastic wife, Irene. As we learn more about Gary’s simultaneous frustration with his life and desire to change it, we also learn that Irene is very sick, stricken with chronic insomnia and an unspecified pain behind her eyes. Jim, a dentist, and Irene’s daughter Rhoda, a vet, live together in equal parts squabbling dissatisfaction and cordial harmony. This harmony is stretched when Jim has an affair with a young trust-funder visiting Mark and Karen, Rhoda’s barista brother and his girlfriend.

In a similar fashion, the event hanging over all the other events in the novel, and ultimately deciding the direction in which the narrative will turn, is the suicide of Irene’s mother, which provides a shocking launch to the book. This is territory Vann has covered before, in his collection “Legend of a Suicide.’’ Additionally, this is a semi-autobiographical story line: Vann’s own stepmother died by suicide. Vann’s writing here is confident and immediate, the most crisply and evocatively described passage in the book. Unfortunately, this sets the bar too high for the rest of the novel. The events that follow, though some are crafted for shock value, can’t live up to the book’s beginning. When Jim’s mistress simultaneously ends the affair and issues a threat that he can’t afford to ignore, the act seems forced. Even Gary and Irene’s struggles against nature as they try, and largely fail, to build a sturdy cabin on an isolated island seem hollow, possibly even re-fried, all the more so when Gary silently calls the failed house “the outward shape of how he had lived his life.’’