You don’t need me to tell you that the frontier looms large in the American imagination - not least because David Vann has already spoken to The White Review about the call of the wild:
“Forge your own paths, build cabins, hammer it out in the wilderness, clear trees – that’s somehow part of the American imagination – that’s who we are and Alaska is our final frontier. I think the whole nation imagines it.”
He also explained:
“I am inspired by the American tradition of rural writing, authors such as William Faulkner, Annie Proulx and Toni Morrison. A whole bunch of my favourite authors wrote about these rural landscapes in America. I actually think that’s the best kind of American writing. The longer tradition of American writing is actually rural and I think we forget that. I think for people to think that it’s the urban novel set in New York is a really skewed view.”
Anyone who has read about Gary’s yearning for the edge of the map in Caribou Island will be able to see how the book fits into that “longer tradition”. Naturally, plenty of other critics have also included Vann within it. Small people battling a giant landscape. I thought first of Jack Keroauc and his flight for isolation and the wilderness while firewatching in Desolation Angels. It recalled Ernest Hemingway’s tormented lonely men pitting themselves against nature in stories like Big Two-hearted River and After The Storm. Naturally enough, with the Alaskan setting, I also thought of Jack London. And few can read an American book about living in cabins by water without thinking about Walden. Thoreau’s bid to live “simply and wisely” would surely resonate with poor old Gary, even if Thoreau chose for himself a much cosier spot in which to live. And even if Thoreau built his cabin in order to improve his life rather than provide a suitably metaphorical wreck in which to end it.
But there’s an interesting thing about Caribou Island. It never mentions this tradition. We don’t really know what Gary thinks about Walden - or any of the other American cabin writers. Those great forebears might be in Vann’s DNA, but they are not in his character’s minds. Gary, the “champion of regret” has a coherent philosophy. “We live to build and that’s what defines us,” he thinks. He wants to be “homo faber” the man who does stuff - but, he says this is “Vonnegut’s idea - really Max Frisch’s idea.” Neither of those two are typical exponents of the beard and big jumper school of writing. Meanwhile, Gary’s very closest literary touchstones are not American. They are the Icelandic sagas, and the dark Saxon clanging of Beowulf and the Seafarer. He feels “a desire from a thousand years ago, a longing for atol ytha gewealc, the terrible surging of the waves.”
So it is that Gary although might be enacting one of the great American dreams, he is also at odds with it. His longing for a kind of life that had disappeared long before Europeans had even discovered Alaska is typical of his mixed-up, Quixotic nature. Typical of a man who will risk his life to build a cabin, but fail to even make foundations for it. Who will finish that cabin and think: “This was without doubt the ugliest cabin he had ever seen, a thing misunderstood and badly constructed from beginning to end. The outward shape of how he had lived his life, but not the outward shape of who he could have been.”
Of course, you could argue that being at odds with the landscape and dodging its literary history still fits into that “longer tradition.” Hemingway’s heroes might have been trying to chase fish, but really they were fleeing their demons. On Desolation Peak Jack Kerouac wrestles with Buddhism and thinks about Japan. Even in Walden, Thoreau tells us that in the morning he bathes his “intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagwat Geeta.”
But the interesting thing about Caribou Island is that it is about more than just one lonely man. Gary might have frontier dreams - but that actually makes him an anomaly among the people populating David Vann’s Alaska. Most spare little thought for the landscape - and it wouldn’t occur to them to judge themselves by it.
“I don’t buy that American transcendentalist, romantic view of nature,” Vann told Metro when the book came out. “There is no inherent meaning in landscape. Alaska is full of people who are trying to escape their lives. It’s a place that is full of despair.”
There’s a telling sequence where Jim the creepy dentist finalises his plans to sleep with Monique and we are told: “Then he looked out to the inlet again and the mountains beyond, the snow on Mount Redoubt, and he thought how clever he was, and how deserving.” He looked at the mountains - but he didn’t really see them, or think about them. He just zeroes back in on himself and assesses his schemes.
Meanwhile, Rhoda (the woman Jim plans to betray) dreams of domestic security and a wedding somewhere hot and posh. Mark, her brother, works on the sea - but only as a means to an end. His goal is to catch enough fish to allow him to spend the winter smoking weed and riding go-karts. He doesn’t give a damn for atol ytha gewealc.
Even the two tourists who ostensibly come to experience authentic Alaskan life don’t really want to engage. Monique is looking for little more than an escape from boredom - and to ask a few mocking questions about encounters with bears. Carl, meanwhile, is probably the one character who truly tries to change something about himself in the novel. But he has his epiphany not when he is battling the elements, but when he is inside a cannery. Here nature is zoomed along a production line and spat out in tins. Salmon parody their life in the sea on a concrete floor: “silvery and gasping, flopping and sliding in their own froth of slime, blood and seawater.” And what does Carl realise? Simply that he wants to go home and plug into a conventional life with a conventional career.
Finally, it is only Gary’s wife Irene who really engages with his dreams of isolation and the simple life - but she does so with long suffering resentment shading to outright hostility. She goes along with the programme - but essentially thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. The conclusion she brings to the whole farrago is extreme - but also inevitable. It shows that no good can come of fantasising about the edges of civilisation. To push for the frontier is to fall off the edge of the map. Caribou Island isn’t quite so in tune with the American “imagination” as it first seems. Really, this is a book that makes you want to stay at home and crank up the central heating.
