'Caribou Island': portrait of a failing marriage in the forbidding vastness of the 49th state

'Caribou Island'

by David Vann

Harper, 304 pp., $25.99

If "Sarah Palin's Alaska" were anything like the relentlessly bleak contemporary frontier conjured in David Vann's "Caribou Island," the ex-governor's producers might not have chosen to set the reality show there.

But while Vann's first full-length novel won't do much for Alaska tourism, it triumphs in its juxtaposition of claustrophobia-inducing relationships against the forbidding vastness of our 49th state.

Irene and Gary are a middle-aged couple in the tiny town of Soldotna on the sparsely populated Kenai Peninsula. It's an idyllic land of lakes, inlets and mountains, but this couple's marriage suffers from a midlife crisis.

They have two grown-up children, Rhoda and Mark, who are pursuing their own paths in life, so with no one else in the house, Irene and Gary's marriage feels even more fraught. They only have each other.

Out of restlessness perhaps, Gary comes up with the harebrained idea to build a cabin on Caribou Island, a tiny paradise studded with evergreens in the middle of Skilak Lake. There he can spend his twilight years living a kind of Nordic fantasy. He and Irene will build the cabin together by hand.

Vann's novel is preoccupied with the idea of pressure, forces both external and internal.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that Gary's plan will only add pressure to his frayed marriage, especially considering his wife's deteriorating emotional state and sense of alienation.

Irene has started having crippling headaches, and the cause remains a mystery to her, her family and her doctor. Like the storms constantly gathering outside, something is agitating her from the inside.

She hates her life and begins to feel her marriage was a mistake, an unfortunate detour along the path to true happiness. Her loved ones just think she can't be pleased. But her angst runs deeper, rooted in the childhood trauma of discovering her mother hanging lifeless from a noose in her family's living room.

The awful weather, a seething antagonist in this novel, suggests to us something's got to give.

When clouds aren't moving in or moving out, they brood like cranky angels, torturing the central characters with buckets of rain.

After Irene tells her husband he's destroyed her life by wanting to live so far from civilization, she "stood in the rain and wind that had no power to purify, empty water," Vann writes.

But Gary is building the cabin for selfish reasons, and when he kicks back and imagines the almost mythic isolation he'll enjoy there, Irene appears nowhere in his vision. It's his Viking dream, not Irene's. He needs to come clean about his regrets and she hers. The unremitting pressure making Irene's head throb is an apt metaphor for the catharsis needed to set them both free.

The reader will find Vann's truncated sentences either compelling or distracting. Vann uses chiseled phrases and verb-less declarations to evoke the natural ruggedness of the setting as well as the character's emotional distress.

As Vann writes about Rhoda's listless fiancé, Jim: "Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. 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."

After a storm, there should come a clearing. But none appears to be on the horizon for the people who endure the lonesome yet strangely alluring wilderness in this beautifully gloomy debut novel.

Tyrone Beason is a writer for Pacific Northwest Magazine.