Caribou Island
by David Vann
Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2011, Dublin Longlist 2013
Date Read: February 12, 2023
Irene and Gary’s marriage is in shambles. They have slowly grown apart over the last several decades and with their children now grown, they grate against each other like metal on concrete. Making things worse is that they don’t have the kind of relationship where they can be real with each other, admit their failings and figure out if they should split or work on it. The entire situation is exhausting.
Their children, Rhoda and Mark, aren’t doing much better for themselves. Rhoda is in a loveless relationship, living with her dentist boyfriend Jim and waiting for his proposal. What she doesn’t realize is that Jim has discovered he has a wandering eye and doesn’t care who he hurts in the process. He actively plots how he can meet new women and how to keep his affairs a secret from Rhoda. To make himself more desirable, he buys gym equipment and works out every day.
Mark is a wanderer with a hippie bent. He vacillates between fishing, the canning factory, taking tourists out on boats and anything else for which he can make a buck. He doesn’t shy away from hard work, though. He lives with his girlfriend Karen and lives in an unfinished house on the lake shore, making do without heat and other basics.
Gary has always wanted to build a log cabin from scratch and years ago, he and Irene purchased land on Caribou Island for this purpose. Gary has decided the time is now and is hell bent on finishing the cabin before the first snow, putting such unrealistic pressure on him and Irene. He barges ahead without blueprints, knowhow or any real plan, knocking wood together and becoming mystified when huge gaps form between the logs. The entire endeavor is just unbelievable folly. Does he think this cabin will repair their marriage?
Irene, helping with construction in equal measure to her resentment, is bitter and afraid for the future. She resents her husband and herself, blaming Gary for her isolation from others when it’s clearly a shared reality. As the project commences, she becomes ill and has soul shattering headaches for which no doctor can diagnose a remedy. You can literally watch her fall apart page by page. She is afraid of ending up like her mother, who she discovered hanging from a noose when she was young.
As the cabin takes shape, the entire slap-dash structure is wonky and somehow defies gravity. They are living at the lake, in the snow and bitter cold, in tents with no electricity or heat. I had to read most of this under a blanket, the cold seeping off the page and chilling me to the bone. So many times I wish I could slap both of them across the cheeks and scream at them to just get real or walk away. Why draw out their suffering and continue making each other miserable?
As the cabin nears completion, Gary realizes what Irene already knows – the cabin is uninhabitable, especially in winter, which was the entire point of the rush to complete it. With no hope of change on the horizon, Irene takes matters into her own hands and settles on a final solution. The ending is tragic and breathtaking.
This was a beautifully written and difficult novel to get through. Vann did an outstanding job of conveying the despair and hopelessness of this couple clinging to the bottom rung of their marriage. Yet, for all of their misery, love still existed in a small ember. Why they couldn’t actually fan it was so difficult to bare. Instead they chose to isolate themselves from each other. And ultimately, Caribou Island is about isolation, both internal and external. And what better setting for this exploration than Alaska?
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