With the backdrop of the rugged Alaska wilderness, Caribou Island starts off as a precursor of what is to come. Irene tells her daughter ,Rhoda about her mother’s suicide and how she was the one to discover her hanging.
“It was long ago, Irene said. And it was something I couldn’t see even at the time, so I can’t see it now. I don’t know what she looked like hanging there. I don’t remember any of it, only that it was.”
Irene and Gary have been married for well over 25 years and are not getting along. The each want different things. Gary wants to move out to the desolate Caribous Island and build a cabin from scratch, with no plans or blue prints and no input from anyone else. Irene doesn’t appear to know what it is she wants, but it isn’t living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. She never really wanted to live in Alaska, to begin with.
“The trees all around seemed almost an audience, standing there waiting, watching her. Sentinels in the shadows, hidden away on a moonless night. She had never grown accustomed to this place, never felt it was home.”
Irene knows that if she doesn’t go along with Gary’s plan that their marriage will be over. She does go along with it but grudgingly and Gary knows it and resents her for it. Rhoda tries to be the peace keeper between her parents while trying to figure out her own life. She plans to marry her boyfriend who is a dentist. She also tries to enlist her brother, Mark’s help with their parents but he is a stoner who doesn’t want to get involved. He tries to stay as far away from his parents as he can.
Nobody in this book has experience genuine love and are not in love with their parents. There is a lot of arguing, back jabbing and even some adultery. In the last chapters of the book everything comes to a head and a heartbreaking conclusion.
Caribou Island is a very bleak novel and David Vann sets the tone from the first page. He uses the Alaskan wilderness as a symbol for the isolation and sadness of his characters. His writing is sparse yet meaningful. However, there was a character, Monique that felt out of place , that was just thrown in to have an affair with one of the main characters. She was so superficial that I felt she distracted from the real story.
I did think the novel was worthwhile and I did enjoy David Vann’s writing style.
3/5
Thanks to Harper Collins Publishers and Net Galley for the ebook galley of this book.
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