{"id":11387,"date":"2011-02-10T15:18:08","date_gmt":"2011-02-10T20:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11387"},"modified":"2011-02-11T11:14:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-11T16:14:00","slug":"david-vann-on-%e2%80%98caribou-island%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/10\/david-vann-on-%e2%80%98caribou-island%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"David Vann on \u2018Caribou Island\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Diana Matar.<\/p><\/div>\n

David Vann\u2019s <\/em>Caribou Island<\/a> is my favorite novel<\/a> of the past few years. <\/em>I read it last summer for possible excerpt<\/a> in <\/em>The Paris Review. It\u2019s the story, set against the striking landscape of the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, <\/em>of Irene and Gary, whose\u00a0thirty-year marriage is collapsing. The story is disturbing; I read it quickly, consumed. I loved the book so much that I was reluctant to see that an excerpt wasn\u2019t working. The story was so powerful as a whole\u2014it was irreducible. I recently had the chance to talk to Vann. <\/em><\/p>\n

You alternate between characters\u2019 points of view, and between their stories. How did the shape of the book come about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

None of it was planned. I was writing seven days a week, a few pages every day, and those were where the chapters ended. It really was such a blind process writing the book. I didn\u2019t know each day what the characters would do or say; I didn\u2019t know when a chapter would end; I didn\u2019t know what the next chapter would be or where it was headed. And so with each chapter, I felt like it had come to where it closed, and then each time, luckily, there was some clear sense of where to go next.<\/p>\n

How long did the book take to write?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Five and a half months.<\/p>\n

Wow.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I started it fourteen years ago when I finished Legend of a Suicide<\/a>, <\/em>and I only got forty-eight pages in, and then I just couldn\u2019t figure out how to write a longer arc. I didn\u2019t know whose story it was or where it was supposed to focus, so I put it away. That\u2019s when I went to sea and became a captain and wrote A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea<\/a>. <\/em>I couldn\u2019t get Legend of a Suicide<\/em> published, so I pouted for a while and didn\u2019t write for five and a half years. Not writing was partly pouting and partly because I was stuck. I couldn\u2019t figure out how to do a novel. And I felt like my brain wouldn\u2019t do a longer arc. But in January 2009, I was walking on Skilak Lake, walking out across the frozen lake toward Caribou Island, and I felt like I could see all of it. It seemed really clear that Irene had to be the focus, she had to be the main character right from the start, and that the story had to begin really late, and that their marriage would already be in trouble. The whole thing would feel like the final sequence in that way. I think that was why it was easy to get from chapter to chapter and why they\u2019re fairly short and quick, as if they\u2019re really all the final sequence.<\/p>\n

Did those forty-eight pages remain the same?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, it was a completely different feel. At the time, I was reading The End of Vandalism<\/em> by Tom Drury. And that\u2019s such a jokey kind of novel, I really love it. It\u2019s funny throughout\u2014so that was the tone and pace of Caribou Island<\/em> when I started it. But it wasn\u2019t right and I couldn\u2019t do it, and so when I returned to it, it became more like my other work and less like his. It\u2019s drama and tragedy, not humor.<\/p>\n

The central character in Caribou Island<\/em>, Irene, is a fifty-five-year-old woman. Was it difficult to write from her point of view?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Irene is me, basically. I had those terrible headaches, I have some of those views of men that she has of Gary, and her frustrations about his vacancy and his impatience, and yet I\u2019m also Gary. But I felt close to her struggle. It was about six months afterwards that I finally saw, Holy crap, that\u2019s me. But that\u2019s why it felt smooth and didn\u2019t feel strange. I never had the thought,\u00a0 I\u2019m writing from a woman\u2019s point of view, I have to figure out what that is. I was just writing my own story through Irene.<\/p>\n

What about alternating narrators throughout the book\u2014was that a conscious decision?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I needed to have a little bit of each person\u2019s life. I had to show how they see and are experiencing the story. When I consider how a novel works, point of view is not an important category. I realize that\u2019s totally weird, that I\u2019m wrong, but in my mind, it\u2019s not one of the things I think about. I think about the landscape as being tremendously important.<\/p>\n

There is so much unhappiness in this book, but there\u2019s also a lot of beauty in the natural world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wilderness doesn\u2019t have any meaning on it\u2019s own\u2014no inherent meaning\u2014it\u2019s a giant mirror and we give it whatever meaning we want. When you describe nature, you end up indirectly describing the characters. The characteristics of the natural world are a reflection of what the characters are feeling and who they are.<\/p>\n

My favorite parts of the description are when things shift and transform and become very odd. When Irene is running and the landscape is tilting and she imagines the whole island is rolling over to go upside down, that\u2019s exactly why I write, for moments like that. To me that\u2019s really beautiful, that the whole landscape actually shifts, that an island could uproot and turn over. That\u2019s really a shift in a landscape that tells us about the inside life of the character and it\u2019s unexpected and it\u2019s weird and it\u2019s a kind of crazy world. What I like best about fiction is that it\u2019s paranoid and cohesive and compressed. Everything refers, there\u2019s nothing incidental, and it has these ruptures that are crazy, these transformations where the world changes shape and becomes something else.<\/p>\n

You have a nonfiction book, Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU Shooter, Steve Kazmeirczak<\/em>, out this October. Are you working on another novel? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. Like Caribou Island<\/em>, it also works through the landscape, but it\u2019s set in California instead of Alaska. It\u2019s set in the central valley in Carmichael (a suburb of Sacramento), on a ten-acre walnut orchard that is cut off from suburbia surrounding it. There\u2019s a second location in the Sierras. It takes place during one burning-hot summer. The novel is like a play in that it\u2019s limited to a cast of five characters and it takes place in about ten days.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one thing I loved about Caribou Island<\/em>: a small cast of characters with whom you go deep.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s really a central part of my aesthetic, if I have one. I think of a novel as a play that\u2019s told through description, and I want to limit the story as much as possible. It\u2019s the opposite of someone like Franzen, for instance, who\u2019s trying to absorb the broader culture. I\u2019m trying to limit things so that more pressure is put on the characters and they break in some way. The novel is almost like an atom smasher.<\/p>\n

How is writing fiction different from nonfiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t get my nonfiction to really take off in the way the fiction does. It doesn\u2019t surprise me in the same way. It doesn\u2019t have the same level of pattern in the language and overall structure. I know that a better nonfiction writer must have that great experience of the story coming alive, but that doesn\u2019t happen for me.<\/p>\n

What are you reading? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I just read Annie Proulx\u2019s new memoir, Bird Cloud. <\/em>I love her so much. She\u2019s my second-favorite writer.<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s your favorite?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think Cormac McCarthy\u2019s Blood Meridian<\/em> is my favorite book. <\/em>Marilynne Robinson was a bigger influence on me and she\u2019s better and more likeable in some ways, but Blood Meridian<\/em> is such a great book. McCarthy specializes in that extension of literal landscapes to figurative landscapes, borrowed from Faulkner. I value that so much and go for it in my own writing.<\/p>\n

Is there a physical place that\u2019s a touchstone for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, in New Zealand. My wife and I bought some land there seven years ago. Someday soon we\u2019ll finally be able to build a small house on it and live there. I think of it every single day and long for it and want to be there, so it\u2019s taken on a really powerful presence in my psychology. It represents the life that I want, a place to ease into and relax, my desire for peace and belonging, to go for a hike every day. It\u2019s seventeen acres on a rolling hillside, with native totara trees, which look like bushy Christmas trees, and grass in between. You can walk quite across the property and up onto a ridge, and look out on these exposed rocks. That\u2019s really where my dream life is, right there in that place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Vann\u2019s Caribou Island is my favorite novel of the past few years. I read it last summer for possible excerpt in The Paris Review. It\u2019s the story, set against the striking landscape of the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, of Irene and Gary, whose\u00a0thirty-year marriage is collapsing. 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