Caribou Island by David Vann
Penguin $30
The disintegration of American dreams into nightmares is the leitmotiv of this first novel. Its narrative punches you from the first paragraph: "I'm ten years old ... I opened our front door and found my mother hanging from the rafters. I'm sorry, I said."
Vann (who's appearing at the Auckland Writers' and Readers Week on May 14 and 15) won deserved acclaim for his relentless short story sequence, Legend of a Suicide. Here he's developed characters - make that pared them down - for this unsettling work.
Gary and Irene are lateish-middle-aged Alaskans. He's an unfulfilled "champion of regret", who in an act of self-laceration decides to build a log cabin in the northern wilderness. She's also unhappy, locked into a marriage based on mutual, perverse punishment, shot through with brief and poignant attempts at redemption.
Off they go to a geographical and metaphorical island, a freezing, sodden, barely-accessible, wind-and-rain-lashed, mosquito-racked place that would test the strongest bonds and wills. Things are never going to end sunnily.
There are memorable individual scenes: the heaving mystery of the sea; the crackle of sexual deception; the grim comedy of a home-building doomed from its inception. But people, events, afflictions are unfinished, undefined.
Then the story tautens, sets itself, and drills inexorably towards catastrophe, flinty truths, terrible words and an appalling, tour-de-force of an ending.
Vann's Alaska is occasionally a place of jewelled water, pelicans, humpbacked whales glowing gold above the waves, mountains lifting from the bay. More often, it's "a 30 degree drop in temperature, the sky gone dark, a malevolence, a beast physical and intent".
The emotional impact of Caribou Island comes also from the tragedies of good intentions and the resulting pathos that flecks it. The moments of frail hope and love are quite heart-breaking: a moss garden; a realisation of lost knowledge; a memory of being happy, in love and 24.
It isn't always plausible or structured or even coherent. But, my word, is it compelling.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
