David Vann – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.24 CARIBOU ISLAND by David Vann /2011/caribou-island-by-david-vann/ Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:37:48 +0000 /?p=14760 Book Quote:

“In the beginning, Irene thought. There is no such thing as a beginning.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 18, 2010)

This is a richly absorbing and dark, domestic drama that combines the natural, icy world of the Alaska frontier with a story of deceptive love and betrayal. If Steinbeck and Hemingway married the best of Anita Shreve, you would get David Vann’s Caribou Island. His prose is terse and the characterizations are subtle, but knifing. Like Shreve, his characters are saturated with loneliness and disconnection with their lives, with each other, in a pit of misperception, despair and exile, in a conflict of selves that beat each other down. The topography and remoteness of this “exclave” state, a place non-contiguous physically with its legal attachment (of the US) serves as one of many metaphors to the attachments exemplified in this story.

Virginia Woolf, while attempting to write the life story of artist Roger Fry, observed: “A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand.” Although this is a novel, not a biography, Vann’s characters are desperately attempting to grasp, hide and reinvent themselves, trying to fill impossible voids, reconcile the past. The author explores the links between memory and myth, the gray area between real and idea, the notion of identity, and the truth of self-deception. There is stoic Irene, haunted by a childhood of abandonment; her cruel, mulish, and spineless husband, Gary; their (often) oblivious daughter, Rhoda; and Rhoda’s puerile and feckless fiancé, Jim. Minor characters (such as their taciturn, alienated son, Mark) move through the novel and accelerate the anxiety and self-destruction of this quartet of refractory souls. They unconsciously use their mates to mirror and shadow what is desired, lost, forgotten, or never was. Vann creates a circle of repetition and insularity in a vast expanse of territory, a terror of the self at its most heinous and human.

“…if they could take all their previous selves and nail them together, get who they were five years ago and twenty-five years ago to fit closer together, maybe they’d have a sense of something solid.”

Gary is insisting on building a log cabin in the isolated Caribou Island, pulling Irene into this last-ditch retirement dream, rife with poor planning and ripe with the unspoken threat of finally leaving her. Thirty years ago he brought her to Alaska from Berkeley, another time that he tried to create an idyllic life from an idea, and failed.

“The momentum of who she had become with Gary, the momentum of who she had become in Alaska, the momentum that made it somehow impossible to just stop right now and go back to the house. How had that happened?”

“Gary was a champion at regret…Their entire lives second-guessed. The regret a living thing, a pool inside him.”

Thirty-year-old Rhoda is devoted to Jim, (who is a decade older), in an almost frantic state to get married to a man who doesn’t really love her, on the precipice of repeating her mother’s mistake. Meanwhile, Jim is on a quest to redefine himself, to combine two opposing lifestyles.

Vann does a spectacular job of engaging the reader gradually into this blistered turmoil of dissolution. The climax was compelling, creating a circle, a literary architecture of repetition. However, as penetrating and irresistible as this form was, I had a problem with the outcome. I felt that he sacrificed authenticity for symmetry. I cannot go further without giving spoilers.

Despite my vexation with the ending’s credibility, I was gripped by the power of this atmospheric story, the characters, the exquisite pacing, and the infinite amount of quotable passages. It took me a long time to remove myself from this moody, nuanced tale.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 76 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper (January 18, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: David Vann
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Also, see our review of a T.C. Boyle novel:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> CARIBOU ISLAND by David Vann /2011/caribou-island-by-david-vann-2/ Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:35:44 +0000 /?p=15519 Book Quote:

“What Gary wanted was the imagined village, the return to an idyllic time when he could have a role, a set task, as blacksmith or baker or singer of a people’s stories. That’s who he really wanted to be, the “shaper,”  the singer of a people’s history, which would be one and the same. What Irene wanted was only to never be alone again, passed around, unwanted.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 18, 2010)

Many people think of Alaska as wildness with great open spaces in a mountainous wildernous with sub-arctic cold, dark and long winters, ever-light summers, bears and moose. This is not the Alaska of David Vann. His Alaska consists of what sounds like an area most likely the Tongass National Rain Forest. This is the northernmost rainforest on earth, and it extends into southeast Alaska. Trees here are huge but grow close together here much like in the Amazon. It rains up to 400 inches a year in this part of Alaska and the days are often dark and dismal with damp that cuts right through you. There is no vista in this forest; all you have are the trees that hem you in.

It is in this Alaska that Gary and Irene realize that their marriage is falling apart, that they go through the motions of one last try at redeeming their moribund marriage. They decide to build a cabin on Caribou Island, a place both isolated and isolating. Gary has no coherent plans and their cabin ends up as a bunch of sticks stuck together every which way with huge gaps everywhere. The elements are not kept out and the rain, snow and wind wails through the cabin even as the last nail is hammered crookedly in.

Irene blames Gary for her life, for not having fulfilled what she might have been without him, and Gary blames Irene for his life’s failures as well. Once he was a promising dissertation student at University of California Berkeley. Now he goes from ill-conceived project to ill-conceived project, each one failing and losing money. Irene was once a happy hippy chick who now goes weeks with horrific pain in her head for which doctors can find no source. They have two children, Mark and Rhoda. Mark is barely in their lives but Rhoda has a dream of helping them find salvation with each other.

Irene is the survivor of her mother’s suicide. Her father was cheating and her mother decided to take her own life instead of living for Irene. Rhoda is on the verge of marrying a dentist who has already begun to cheat on her during their engagement. He has things all planned out. He’ll keep switching receptionists, having affairs with them and then letting them go. It sounds like Rhoda is heading for the same train wreck as her mother and grandmother – a distant marriage and an unfaithful husband. Many of these themes appear in Vann’s brilliant first book, Legend of a Suicide.

Caribou Island has many of the same themes as Legend of a Suicide – the inability to find intimacy with others, the desire to hurt those we try to love, and not knowing how to do things right in our own lives and for others. This book is not for the weak-hearted. It is bold and brutal, never a syrupy sentence or a hi-jinks kinda laugh. It is as serious as the death of a loved one. Even aspects of the book such as boat rides take on a dire nature and I had to wonder what awful thing would come next.

This is a reader’s book. It is a book for people who love to read and it is why we read. It is one of the best books I have read recently and it knocked my socks off. More importantly, it changed how I see the world. It is THAT good.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 76 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper (January 18, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: David Vann
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Also, see our review of a T.C. Boyle novel:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> LEGEND OF A SUICIDE by David Vann /2010/legend-of-a-suicide-by-david-vann/ /2010/legend-of-a-suicide-by-david-vann/#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 21:34:32 +0000 /?p=10830 Book Quote:

“I just don’t know,”  he said aloud. “Roy, are you awake?”
“Yes”.
“God, I just don’t know.”
That was our last communication. I didn’t know, either, and I wanted only to shrink farther down into my sleeping bag. He had a terrific pain in his head that painkillers couldn’t reach, an airiness in his voice that was only becoming more hollow, and other mysteries of despair I didn’t want to see or hear. I knew where he was headed, as we all did, but I didn’t know why. And I didn’t want to know.

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 15, 2010)

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide consists of a novella and short stories that are semi-autobiographical. Vann spent his early years in Ketchikan, Alaska where his father had a dental practice. His father sold the practice and bought a fishing boat that he hoped would provide a living. His father invested unwisely and lost a lot of money. On top of that, the IRS was after him for some investments he made in other countries. Vann’s parents divorced when Vann was about five years old because his father was unfaithful. Vann was witness to some horrific fights between his parents. His father was mercurial of mood, likely with manic-depression that appears to have been undiagnosed. After his parent’s divorce, Vann moved to California with his mother and sister. When Vann was thirteen years old, his father asked him to spend a year in Alaska with him. Vann declined. Two weeks later, his father shot himself. This book is Vann’s attempt to get his head around his father’s suicide, along with his own feelings of guilt, shame, anger, denial and fears.

Vann states in an interview that he believes that it is important to read this book in order. The first short story, “Ichthyology” is where the opening quote of this review comes from. In the book, David refers to himself as Roy and his father as Jim. This beautiful and painful story is about the impact of his parent’s divorce on David’s behaviors. He becomes oppositional and vandalizes his neighborhood. No one appears to connect his behaviors with what is happening in his life at the time. The story is told against the backdrop of Roy’s aquarium and a blinded iridescent shark that manages to survive a horrific attack and continues to live, gradually learning to make its way in the tank without bumping into things.

The novella,”Sukkwan Island,” is in two parts. It took my breath away with its wildness, beauty, pain and anguish. In the first part, Roy goes with his father to Sukkwan Island, an uninhabited island in southeast Alaska, where his father has purchased land and a cabin. There, he has to deal with the horrors of his father’s anger, unpreparedness and depression. His father cries most every night and “confesses” to Roy about the mistakes he’s made in his life. Roy doesn’t know what to do. He wants to leave the island but he is afraid of hurting his father. His father ends up taking his life. In part two, Roy walks in and witnesses his father holding a pistol to his head. His father gives Roy the pistol and walks out. Roy takes his own life. The action of suicide and the reactions to it are what give this novella its power and grace. What leads up to suicide or attempted suicide is a psychological study of the human psyche lost in pain and despair, choosing to go into the unknown rather than live another day. I have never read such an achingly painful testimony to grief and survival.

In the short story “Ketchikan,” Roy is a young man of 30 who returns to Ketchikan to try and learn something about his father. Though he is not very successful, he does re-enact some of his rage and anger towards his father by replicating the vandalism of his youth.

This is a book of metaphors, layers, and attempts to build meaning out of nuance and emotion. It is a brilliant book, one that left me feeling raw and numb but also in awe of having read something that will stay with me forever.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 23 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper Perennial; 1 edition (March 16, 2010)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: David Vann
EXTRAS: Excerpt in The New York Times
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Our two reviews of Caribou Island:

Another book that struggles with a family tragedy:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

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