New West Book Review

Cabin Building Drives Couple Toward Tragedy in David Vann’s “Caribou Island”

By Jenny Shank, 2-21-11

Caribou Island
by David Vann
Harper Collins, 293 pages, $25.99

David Vann’s accomplished debut novel Caribou Island is the latest addition to a sub-branch of Western American literature that has surged recently: the house building horror story. Sarahlee Lawrence’s memoir River House details her Sisyphean struggles to build a log cabin in central Oregon, a quest that drives her relationship with her father to the brink. Last month, Annie Proulx published her first memoir, Bird Cloud, about her efforts to build a dream house on a remote plot of Wyoming land. Even though she wasn’t doing the building herself, Proulx also seems to have sacrificed some measure of her sanity and ultimately considered the enterprise a failure.

Now comes Gary and Irene, the discontented married couple at the center of David Vann’s compelling tragedy. They’ve lived on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula since they were in their twenties, when Gary quit his graduate studies in medieval literature because he wanted to move to Alaska. Now in his fifties, feeling the sting of dreams deferred, he decides it’s time to build a cabin on the remote Caribou Island and live out there, as he always planned they would before raising children and making a living got in the way.

Irene does not want to build a cabin or live away from her grown daughter, Rhoda, who is generous and dependable. (Her son Mark does little but fish and smoke pot.) As Gary proceeds with the cabin building plans, Irene is increasingly haunted by memories of when she was ten years old and discovered her mother’s suicide. Worse, after Gary forces her to work on the cabin during a raining, bitter cold day, she develops a crushing headache, an intense pain that will not subside. No doctor can find a physical cause for it, and as it prevents Irene from sleeping, she grows crankier and disconnects from reality. Gary, meanwhile, has always been a little disconnected from reality, self-centered and gruff. Gary and Irene have passive aggressed against each other for years, and the trials of cabin building drive them toward active aggression.

Although I haven’t participated in building a cabin, because of what I learned from Lawrence’s memoir, I knew the cabin building enterprise depicted in Caribou Island was in trouble from the beginning. First of all, they start only a few months before winter sets in. Lawrence’s cabin took her more than a year to build. Gary decides to proceed with no foundation. And just live on mud? And you’re not going to even level those logs, Gary? If you think you can just patch the gaps sufficiently later, you are mistaken, my friend. I found myself siding with Irene on this one. But as the wheels of this tragedy grind forward, it becomes clear that no one is going to ever live in this misbegotten cabin.

While Irene and Gary struggle with the doomed cabin, Rhoda becomes stuck in the middle of a romantic triangle, unbeknownst to her. Poor Rhoda, the only likeable character in the book, sets herself up for heartbreak because she’s honest and demonstrates normal human emotions such as love, trust, and concern for her parents, boyfriend, and brother. A couple of Mark’s friends—Carl and his fetching girlfriend Monique—blow in to town. Rhoda, a thirty-year-old veterinary assistant, lives with her boyfriend Jim, a forty-one-year-old dentist, who immediately hits Monique up for a date.

Jim is a weasel, and it’s amusing to see Monique lead him on and torture him, draining his bank account before she allows him to sleep with her. No aspect of life is romanticized in Caribou Island, and Jim’s thoughts about his relationships are characteristic when he thinks Monique “was the most beautiful woman he would ever be with. That was a certainty. There would never be anything better, and he had half his life still to live. That was depressing. Rhoda was safe, though, and available. He’d get a ring, and maybe they’d even have kids, all of which made him want to yank the wheel and flip into a ditch.”

Vann even refuses to romanticize Alaska, which comes off as a forbidding and inhospitable place. “Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile,” Jim thinks. “Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn’t cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge. These tiny towns in a great expanse, enclaves of despair.”
Jim’s not the only character who feels this way about Alaska. Irene, too, has come to curse the place as she works on the detested cabin out in the elements: “A fair representation of her three decades in Alaska, slumping down in raingear, hiding, making herself as small as possible, fending off mosquitoes that somehow managed to fly despite the wind. Feeling chilled and alone. Not the expansive vision you’d be tempted to have, spreading your arms on some sunny day on an open slope of purple lupine, looking at mountains all around.”

There are no sunny days in Caribou Island, and although the book is engrossing, written in sharp, clear prose, and well paced, reading it is not fun. But then tragedies aren’t supposed to be fun, and Caribou Island follows most of Aristotle’s famous rules for tragedy, including its depiction of “incidents arousing pity and fear” which he believed produced a catharsis in the audience. And if you’re looking for a catharsis, far better to find it in the pages of Caribou Island than to seek it in building your own doomed house on some inhospitable Western plot of land.

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