David Vann / Features / Untitled Books

“I think of putting characters in wilderness as putting them on a bare stage and there’s this intense pressure on them because there’s no distractions and they can’t get away. And the weather in Alaska cranks up that pressure.”

Photograph: ©Diana Matar

David Vann

The author of Caribou Island tells Mark Reynolds about multiple narratives, mining personal tragedies, the crassness of horror, the thrill of risk, the lure of myths and the meaning of Alaska.

David Vann's story collection Legend of a Suicide and his latest novel, Caribou Island are both rooted in highly-charged tragedies from his own family history, beginning with the suicide of his father when Vann was 13. In each book, he isolates the two main characters in a lakeside cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, to see how their relationships will play out against the worst that nature can throw at them. As I meet him over coffee at the start of his London tour, he insists it is more of an obligation than a conscious decision to mine these dark themes.

"I think that writers don't really get to choose their material," he says. "Because my dad's suicide was the biggest story in my life and it was the ugliest story of my life, it was inevitable I would want and need to write about it. And what's wonderful about fiction is that it's redemptive and it transforms those stories into something else."

The events in Caribou Island were sparked by the real-life murder-suicide of his stepmother's parents, eleven months before his father's death, but many other themes emerged as he wrote.

"It ended up being a meditation on marriage from a lot of different points of view," he explains, "which is not what I expected it would be. The process is mostly unconscious and out of control. I don't really know what I'm going to be writing and I don't really make decisions necessarily. A lot of the things that I thought I should write, or that would be good, all got thrown away. And all of that stuff that just kind of happened and I just started writing, and came quickly, that's all the stuff that's published."

There is an immediacy about his writing that belies the fact that each these books took over a decade to complete.

"I was striving for that. I want it to feel like the book was written in one sitting. That the author sat down and in just one session wrote the whole thing. When I write, I write seven days a week, a couple of hours every day, a couple of pages every day. Legend of a Suicide came together over ten years that I was working on it, but everything that I kept came very quickly, and 'Sukkwan Island', which is most of it, I wrote about half of that in seventeen days of sailing offshore, so it was a mad rush of writing too. And so was every story that I kept. They're all quick, but it just happened over a ten-year period when I was trying to figure out what the hell to do. I've always felt that a reader isn't going to experience anything the author didn't experience, so in order for the reader to feel completely immersed, it's got to be a fast write, like in a single breath. It's got to be as close as possible to that for the author, I think. When I was writing Caribou Island I didn't do anything else for the five-and-a-half months it took, and my wife remembers it as a really grim and boring time when we didn't do anything fun or see anybody, because all I did was the book. And of course readers are impatient and something has to happen every two or three pages. Either some image that's worked in some way that becomes significant, or has more emphasis, or a moment of dramatic tension, or a new conflict between characters emerges that keeps the reader's attention."

There's a powerful opening to Caribou Island, where the main character, Irene, is telling her daughter how at age ten she came upon her own mother hanging from the rafters. This establishes a sense of foreboding around the whole family that plays itself out from the start.

"I wanted it to feel like the whole story is told in the final sequence," he says, "there is no background. It's already inevitable, like things are already set in motion and the characters are already essentially screwed, you know? Things aren't going to work out that well. And, what you're really seeing are their last attempts to try and avert what's coming. But the other part of that was that I was really surprised by various parts of the book, like not realising it would be about marriage, for instance. I think if the surprise doesn't happen for the author it doesn't happen for the reader. There's the momentum and also the freshness. Each day when I sit down and write I don't know what the characters are going to do and say. I discover it each day and that process of discovery transfers from the author to the reader. It's sort of like a hocus-pocus belief that I have, but that's how I feel about it."

That dramatic and violent final sequence is told unflinchingly, but with a spareness that delivers the tragic denouement without resorting to horror.

"It pisses me off when people call it horror," he recoils. "Tragedy and horror are completely different things. Horror has no emotional connection. You watch someone's arm get sawn off, and you don't care about their story, you don't care about who they are, it's just the blood-and-guts effect and that's it. Horror is just empty and stupid. People should not be interested in it. But tragedy engages us in who a person is. It catches us up in their story, and their pathos, we engage in that and we feel it. There's also nothing horrific in the book. The events that happen in the end, it's very clean, very brief, very minimally described. I don't go on about the awful wound, there's none of that."

But how does this square with an extended episode in the earlier book, where a rotting corpse becomes the travelling companion of the lead character across something like 70 pages?

"Legend of a Suicide is totally different," he concedes. "You could compare it more to horror in that way because there's a really grotesque body that features in a whole bunch of it. But there's a psychological reason for it. It wasn't the empty crass shock-and-awe effect of horror. It was because in real life I'd never seen my father's body. For years I didn't believe he was really dead. So, I wrote that to make him finally dead. That was the reason for it. The father discovers the son, but it was really me discovering my father and believing that his body was finally there and finding his head half gone, and that he really was dead and was not coming back. So it wasn't motivated by trying to gross people out or have some kind of shock effect. It had none of the aesthetics of horror, and none of the intentions. It was all about psychological realism, and again that's the opposite of horror, which is psychological fakery and has nothing to do with real people."

Vann recently completed a non-fiction book which throws more light on his highly charged response to the horror genre.

"I have a book coming out in October in the US about a school shooting, and that shooter really loved horror movies, like a lot of mass murderers do. He loved horror and he used to watch all the Saw movies, so I had to watch all the fucking Saw movies. I hate the Saw movies. You watch human beings being tortured and operated upon and you don't care, you just watch their limbs being sawn off and such. The idea that that could be entertainment is mentally ill. Like anyone who enjoys watching one of the Saw movies is actually mentally ill, incapable of engaging in empathy towards another human being, so they're fucked in my mind. And that's millions of Americans who watch those movies."

The setting for both present books is Alaska, and I ask if he has any concerns about being pigeonholed as an Alaskan writer - especially since he has lived over half his life in California.

"Well I won't be pigeonholed for long," he declares, "because my next novel is set in California. It focuses on landscape again, a walnut orchard, and it's hot summer in the central valley of California. It's like a desert. It's the opposite of an Alaskan rainforest."

Climate is an extraordinary physical presence across both books, especially in Caribou Island where the ferocity of the storms is an echo of the rage and anger within the main characters. I speculate whether this story could have been set anywhere outside of Alaska.

"No, I think that one needed to be in Alaska. Because wilderness doesn't have any meaning on it's own, it's just a giant mirror. There's a kind of ferocity in the marriage between Gary and Irene, and after thirty years it's all coming to a head, and that's reflected in the landscape and what they see is a kind of terrifying wilderness, because of what's going on for them. Alaska really does offer storms all of the time. If you're feeling happy and not going through bad times, you might not notice that and just notice the nice days, but for Irene and Gary, especially since he's starting the project late, building in August instead of starting in May, and the time is counting down quickly and the first fall storms come... the weather is a big part of the story in that way, in its force that puts pressure on them. Generally I think of putting characters in wilderness as putting them on a bare stage and there's this intense pressure on them because there's no distractions and they can't get away. And the weather is something that cranks up that pressure, and it's not something that's made up or overdone, it's just the way Alaska is. It constantly has storms, especially in the fall, and stuff changes quickly. Like that line 'If you wanted to be a fool and test the limits of how bad things can get this is a good place for it', it's really true."

Added to the punishing weather is the fact that both Jim in Legend of a Suicide and Gary in Caribou Island set out into the wilderness without any sort of game plan for survival. The off-kilter cabin Gary builds presents a new obstacle at every turn, which he has to waste yet more time in the worsening storms to figure out.

"That's exactly the kind of thing my dad always did in real life. Like he took us rafting down a Class 5 river right after a huge storm with rains that made the river much worse than Class 5. Insane, basically. He did it with no experience. He bought a boat and took three generations of us down the river and almost killed us all. That was the kind of thing that happened throughout my childhood. We were always heading off half-cocked to one place or another, so Gary seems to me totally believable and natural. I would try to build a cabin just the way Gary tries to build it. That's what my cabin would end up looking like. So he was a real depiction of me and the men in my family. Even though it seems impossible that someone could be that stupid..."

These stories take the reader up close to the elemental forces of nature - and human nature - which are easy to identify with despite the fact that few readers will have experienced such extreme conditions. If it's alien to us Brits, do Americans have more of an idea of what Alaska is all about?

"No, Americans have a really warped view of Alaska, which helps make it possible for Sarah Palin to spin her lies. There's a place that Alaska has in the national imagination in the US, that our resourcefulness and goodness is somehow reflected in the wilderness, in nature. As we go to the last frontier we can imagine ourselves a better people than we really are. And so Alaska is to some degree doomed to remain an idea instead of a reality. I don't think it has any meaning of its own, just the meaning we give it. We've been giving it that meaning for so long that it's a very strong sort of narrative. But Alaska is genuinely wild, where you're hiking along a trail and there's bear plop and you have to say "Hey Bear, Hey Bear" as you go and you really could get killed at any point. I mean I feel at risk in Alaska and I don't really feel at risk in, say, the wilder parts of California. Because I spent my early childhood there, my first couple of years of memories are all in Alaska. I think that's why it remains really mythic for me, that it still just seems larger than life. That's where mystery and presence, and shifting shape and all that, that's where it exists for me, in that landscape."

While the new novel is chiefly a portrait of a dying marriage, there are a number of supporting characters and sub-plots that divert from the main story. And plenty of humour too. Was it always designed that way?

"I started writing Caribou Island fourteen years ago when I finished Legend, when I was 30. I wrote 48 pages and I just couldn't go any farther, I just couldn't see how I could do a longer arc. I also didn't know how to do multiple points of view, and I didn't know whose story it was, or where to focus, it was just a big mess. So though I knew that it was a story I wanted to tell, that the material was important to me, and that someday I'd write it, I knew it wasn't going to be then. I was way too confused. So, two years ago, twelve years later, I was out walking on Skilak Lake, where Caribou Island is, at the end of January 2009, walking out across the frozen lake out to the island, and I could suddenly see how to do it, I could see what the longer arc was. I realised it had to be Irene's story, that it was all her. It had to focus on her. I still end up having seven points of view in the book, but it's clearly Irene's story and she's the main point of view. I wanted to have parallel stories. There are basically three couples or relationships that are reflecting on each other, exploring marriage and relationships between men and women. Also it seemed like we needed a break, that it would be too much to have every chapter have Gary and Irene in their conflict. It's nice to break it up a bit."

In one memorable passage (that ran in The Drawbridge), Gary's strongest emotional connection turns out to be to the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, where the hero is driven by a pure longing for annihilation as he gives himself up to the power of the sea. I am curious to know what it might say about the human condition that here's a man capable of relating only to an obscure Old English poem about suffering and sorrow.

"Gary's really alone and isolated and vacant in his relationships," he laughs, "and he's closer in some ways and more responsive to the poetry he studied and wanted to be a scholar of. It was a previous dream. And this is partly autobiographical, actually. I always wanted to be a Medievalist or Anglo-Saxonist, and didn't feel like I could do that and my writing. I also didn't feel like I was smart enough. When I was in grad school, at Cornell, the Medievalists were frighteningly smart and they had a lot of languages that I didn't have. I had Old English and Middle English and Latin and German, but I didn't have French, or Italian like some of them had for Boccaccio, and I couldn't keep up! I couldn't come anywhere close to keeping up. And so I felt his frustrations a bit, and I guess I do feel Gary's sense of aloneness and isolation sometimes, that there's no real connection with other people, that there's a kind of engagement in poetry and in old language. In going back to Old English, that has a kind of connection and excitement, that real life doesn't offer."

Vann was striving for adventure in a past business life that kept failing. In a recent Observer interview, he credited the eventual collapse of his charter sailing enterprise for having allowing him to at last realise that he was not doomed to spiral into depression like his father.

"It is pathetic and sad, but that desire for annihilation is something I wonder about in all my own sailing experiences. I kept destroying my life over and over with the boats, and I kept going out into these storms and kept vowing I'd never go out into them again, but I'd go out into them again, and I just wondered what that was about. And there's something about that test to find out what you're made of, and to find out what the limits are, where you're alive. There's something still mysterious about all that. To me Gary's a living character in that way, like he's hit up against mysteries that I don't really understand. Like I'm just kind of testing them out a bit with him."

There's an almost throwaway line in the penultimate story in Legend of a Suicide: "Absurdity is all that makes grief bearable." This thought is firmly at the root of the sympathy we feel for Vann's sorrowful characters: that without the capacity for a kind of gallows humour there would be only despair, and this is something worth rejoicing in however bad things get.

"I have felt that over and over in real life," he agrees. "My family's had a lot of grief: five suicides, and divorces and abuse and all kinds of things. And what a lot of people turn to in bad moments like that is humour and a sense of the absurd. You know it's kind of funny in some ways the strength of being able to continue on. You know even just continuing on seems absurd, like what's the point, you know? But you do it, and there's a kind of humour to that and that helps you get through it."

So what insights does Vann hope readers will take home from these escalating tragedies of miscommunication, powerlessness, and masochistic bravado as the world caves in around his characters?

"I do view fiction as open-ended, that these questions, the mysteries between people, are open-ended and a book doesn't finish them off, it just opens them up. I like what Chekhov said, that the writer's job is to present the debate, not to judge. It's not about judging the characters, whether they're good or bad, just presenting Gary's side of things and Irene's side of things and watching them fight it out. And just seeing what happens."

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Caribou Island is published by Viking and Legend of a Suicide by Penguin Books.

Mark Reynolds is Literary Editor of The Drawbridge.

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Thursday, 24 February, 2011