David Vann

Legend of a Suicide

about his debut novel,

Caribou Island

which

The Australian

said honours ‘his promise as one of the most exciting writers at work today’, the

New York Times

said was ‘beautifully written’ and Readings staff member Jason Austin called ‘powerful and moving’.

You draw on elements from life for your fiction, but create your own characters and narratives from real-life starting points. What is the relationship between truth and fiction for you, as a writer?

The true story is often too raw and difficult to tell, and wouldn’t be readable. I threw away everything from the first three or four years of working on Legend of a Suicide because there was too much emotion on the first page. I’d describe the day we found out my father died, for instance, and everyone was just running around crying. It wasn’t something you’d want to read. But over time, I began to understand that stories are transformed and told indirectly, and I love the unconscious, out of control power of this. There’s an enormous surprise halfway through Legend of a Suicide, for instance, which changes everything, and I didn’t see it coming until I was writing that sentence. The fiction went its own direction. And what followed that moment were things I had wanted and needed to write for years, all inverted but powered by the weight of the true story in the background.

In

Caribou Island

, I had the murder/suicide of my stepmother’s parents in the background (her father announced to her mother that the last fifteen years of their marriage had been a lie and he was having an affair and moving on, so she killed him and then killed herself). I wanted to understand this rage at a husband, and disappointment and betrayal, but I didn’t want something as obvious and determining as infidelity, and I also didn’t know my stepmother’s parents well. So the characters in

Caribou Island

are invented, with Irene based also partly on my Icelandic grandmother named Irene, but in writing about them I’m trying to understand something which had weight in my real life. When I began the novel, I actually didn’t know I’d be writing about marriage or that the main character would be a woman, but I trust the writing to take on its own life and become more than the true story.

There are so many recurring themes and details between

I kept Rhoda’s name because that’s the name I used for my stepmother in Legend of a Suicide, and Caribou Island explores the true story of her parents. But as you point out, she’s a very different character in this book, younger and with different concerns. I always use my father’s real name, Jim, but he has a lighter and minor role in this book and no children. Legend of a Suicide was entirely about the relationship between father and son, whereas Caribou Island is about marriage.

I do think that any author’s works could be put together into a single volume and would have echoes and correspondences, but I think the strongest connections have to do with method and style rather than theme. I focus on the Alaskan landscape in both books, for instance, trying to find the interior lives of the characters through the landscape.

A central theme in

This idea applies mostly to self. Irene can’t get who she is now, or who Gary is now, to match up with five years ago, or ten years ago, or thirty years ago. Their marriage is a similarly ephemeral thing, and Alaska itself is only a mirror. It has no meaning on its own. It’s only a reflection of the characters. I think that we make our lives in stories, and sometimes those stories break down or can no longer be made, and then we’re in trouble. We can no longer make sense of ourselves.

You build a sense of foreboding for your characters from the opening pages of

Irene and Gary are in trouble, right from the first page. Irene believes that Gary is building this cabin out on the island as a way of leaving her after 30 years of marriage. It’s an unforgiving place, the Alaskan wilderness, and Gary is starting the construction too late in the season. So the entire novel is like the final sequence in a movie. Everything is already set in motion on page 1, and we know we’re going to see consequences. I don’t write for plot (I focus on character and landscape instead), but I do write for dramatic tension, for the consequences that lead from the conflicts between characters.

One fascinating aspect of

You’re right about this. The characters do have different views of what’s going on, and they don’t agree, and we’re not sure whom we can trust. Chekhov said that the writer’s role is to present the full debate without stepping in to say what’s right and what’s wrong. Instead, we have the intensity of the characters’ needs and conflicts. When I write, I’m surprised every day by what the characters do and say, and I hope the reader has this experience, also, of real lives set in motion and the discovery of unconscious pattern.

You’re both romantic and realistic about Alaska as remote wilderness in your books, with loving descriptions of its natural beauty alongside descriptions of its dangers and drawbacks, including a feeling of exile about the place. For example, some characters admire “the beauty of the heavy rain, the constant wind”. Was it important to you to present a complex picture of the place? How important is Alaska itself to Caribou Island and its predecessor?

I was born in Alaska and spent my childhood there. It’s a place still mythic in my imagination. In that cold rainforest, I always felt I was being watched and hunted, and as I ran at age four or five I’d sometimes fall through the forest floor to a second floor, the deadfall was so thick. So Alaska is tremendously important in both books, and I find the story always by returning to the landscape. As I mentioned above, I think wilderness is a giant mirror, without inherent meaning of its own, so when a character sees the landscape in a certain way, we’re learning about the character, and this is how the story builds. The landscape shifts and changes shape and creates meaning, and that meaning can range from the beautiful to the terrifying, depending on what’s happening inside the characters. You can think of wilderness as a bare stage with mirrors all around, and the characters have nowhere to escape, put under enormous pressure.

Rhoda says to Monique, “Why can’t they just be men? Why do they have to become men?” How important is this idea of masculine pride, of the idea of achieving a certain kind of impressive manhood, to

Gary imagines a kind of solitary existence in the wilderness, and it seems that perhaps he would have preferred to be alone instead of being married. But he also feels very anxious on his own, and when he was single, he had trouble getting through even a single evening, not sure how to get through all the hours until sleep. So he can’t quite get the idea of who he’d like to be to match who he is. Jim is even more confused. He’s with Rhoda, who’s wonderful and generous, but he’s distracted and takes her for granted.

Carl says, “Fishing seemed to him a great act of faith, or desperation”. Do you think this applies to marriage, too?

I wouldn’t want to make claims about marriage generally, but for the characters in the book, faith and desperation certainly do apply to marriage. Irene wanted not to be left alone again, after her mother’s suicide and father’s abandonment. She was passed down through various family and never really wanted. So marriage is supposed to be different than all that, and that’s a desperate notion. Gary was failing as an academic and didn’t know what to do with his life, and marriage was something to hold on to, another kind of desperation. Rhoda, heading toward her own marriage, is willing to be believe that Jim has a good heart, and that certainly is faith more than fact.

The character of the beautiful, amoral Monique is an interesting one – her effect on the men around her, particularly the way they idealise her even while her defects are clearly on display (and even as they acknowledge them). What inspired you to create her?

I’ve never admitted this in an interview, but Monique was based on the woman I first fell in love with. She was much smarter than I was, her parents bigwigs in Washington DC who thought I was slow, and she left me, which didn’t seem to bother her at all. So in the book, I’m closest to being Carl. He’s out of place, doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he’s being dumped. But my favourite Monique scenes are the ones with Jim. I think it’s funny how blind he is and how she toys with him. I think he deserves what happens to him. He’s my father in a light cameo role highlighting the desperate affairs that broke up both his marriages.

You’ve been compared to Cormac McCarthy and championed by the likes of Lorrie Moore. Who are your literary influences? Who do you like to read?

What I love about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is the way he extends from a literal landscape into a figurative landscape. He writes “the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear,” and it’s that extension from stone to fear, from the concrete and literal to the abstract and figurative, that creates theme. This is how the work begins to mean something. I’m a sucker for landscape description in other writers, too. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, for instance, and Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, and Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, which is great not only for landscape but also for her use of Old English meter and diction and concentration of content over grammar. I like stylists in that way, and content-rich prose, and I’ve studied quite a few writers in Old English, Middle English, and Latin. Chaucer has been a big influence. The title of Legend of a Suicide means “a series of portraits of a suicide,” using the form of a “legendary” from Chaucer. In non-fiction, my favourite essay is James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” for how he combines the portraits of his father, himself, and the time and place. And of course I love Lorrie Moore and many other short-story writers such as Grace Paley, Flannery O’Connor, etc. I’ve also been influenced by foreign authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I used his “Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship” in a story, for instance), Guiseppe Di Lampedusa, etc.

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Cover image for Caribou Island

Caribou Island

David Vann

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