Caribou Island by David Vann — 304 pgs

Irene and Gary are in a failing relationship. Though things seems civil on the surface, Irene is convinced that this is the last winter that the couple will spend together, sure that Gary will leave her. When Gary decides to build a cabin on Caribou Island, he enlists Irene’s help, but all the couple seem to do is snipe at each other more and more aggressively. Meanwhile, Gary and Irene’s adult daughter Rhoda is hoping to receive a marriage proposal from Jim, her long term boyfriend. But Jim isn’t all that thrilled about settling down with Rhoda and thinks perhaps he can do better. Irene and Gary also have a grown son named Mark, who is basically a shiftless pothead who wants very little to do with the rest of his family and whose prospects have gradually dwindled. When a new couple of Mark’s acquaintance starts hanging around, the woman of the couple, Monique, a manipulative twenty-something, begins to dangerously tempt Rhoda’s boyfriend Jim, a situation that Rhoda is oblivious to. After a particularly grueling day spent building the cabin, Irene seems to have developed a chronic and severe headache that she just can’t shake. After several medical tests reveal nothing, her family is left doubting whether there is anything wrong with her at all or if this is just an attempt to get attention from her fumbling husband. As the misshapen cabin grows, things begin to take a sinister turn in the couple’s marriage, leading to an act of bizarre and frightening violence from which the family will never recover. Bleak and caustic, Caribou Island presents a slice of the life of one family whose dysfunction and apathy will reverberate through all the lives they touch.

While this book had a lot of wonderful and evocative imagery and real ambiance of life in Alaska, I found it to be a very tough pill to swallow. The story was not only dark, but it had all the hallmarks of an irredeemable tragedy that I found very upsetting. The relationship between Irene and Gary was just painful to read about, and though the book mainly dealt with this from Irene’s perspective, It seemed like she was right on the money in predicting just what Gary was thinking in regards to his plans to leave her. I didn’t really like Irene or Gary at all. They were both self-involved, and at least in Irene’s case, there was enough self-pity shooting through her thoughts and actions to slay a horse. Both halves of this couple seemed miserable with each other, and one of the questions I asked myself is how they had managed to stay together for thirty-odd years without realizing that they were just not good for each other. This book started off in the throes of a desperate time for Irene and Gary, and as such, there was no opportunity for me to see what kept this couple together or to witness any of the good times that they ostensibly had. It was like walking into a room at the tail end of a fight, and it felt awkward and uncomfortable, to say the least.

I also had a hard time with the relationship between Rhoda and Jim. While Rhoda is basically driving herself crazy over her mother and father’s doomed relationship and the strange turn in her mother’s health, Jim is off acting like a sleazeball. I wanted Rhoda to be able to see him for what he was, but this never happened. Though she did begin to suspect that Jim was changing right before her eyes, she never really caught on to what he was going through or the resolutions he had made, and those resolutions were a doozy, let me tell you! I began to see that Rhoda’s relationship would eventually mirror her mother’s, and towards the end of the book, Irene even states this obvious fact to her daughter, but nothing could make Rhoda see the deception that Jim was engaged in. Rhoda also had some aspects of co-dependency to her personality, and whether or not she enabled her mother to act in such a bizarre fashion was something that remains cloudy in my mind. Though I really disliked the subplot between Rhoda and Jim, I was eager to see it to the end because I wanted some type of resolution that would make sense to me, but this resolution was only dealt with obliquely.

Much can be said about the repercussions of living in a relationship that is obviously past its prime, a situation that was minutely detailed in this book, but what stuck me the hardest was the way these individuals dealt with each other like enemies. They stored up grudges and dragged them out when they were at their most painful point, and it was really very ugly to witness. I didn’t feel sorry for either of them because they were both obviously so insensitive and cruel to each other. There were points that I felt embarrassed for them and wished that they would just go their separate ways in order to salvage some of the self-respect they had lost, but like boxers, they just kept getting up and pummeling each other over and over again until the final haunting conclusion. It was a sad state of affairs and I can’t say I was entertained by it. I felt a lot of discomfort reading about the perpetual battles and recriminations they put each other through, and by the end of the novel, I was fed up with all the hatred they both took part in. The solution to this problem was inelegant and shocking, and the final thoughts of Irene impacted me as severely selfish and short-sighted.

Though I really didn’t enjoy the story this book told, and often it made me frustrated and angry, I did like the scene setting and atmosphere. It was filled with lush and vivid descriptions and gave me a peek into what it might be like to live in the wilds of Alaska. I can’t say it was a pleasant reading experience though, as most of the time I was very put off by the characters’ behavior and thought patterns, but as a novel that deals with a dysfunctional family, I would have to say that it excels in its ambitions. Not a read for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

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This book was provided as a complimentary review copy.