Caribou Island

David Vann's novel is as bleak as the Alaskan tundra. The lives of self-absorbed characters reveling in their dissatisfaction are brought to life by Bronson Pinchot's mesmerizing narration. He uses intonation and pacing to make each character unique. Irene, the catalyst for the events in the story, has the voice of one fearful of being alone as she imagines her husband, Gary, planning his desertion. His voice is full of regret as he berates a life that has never gone his way, never accepting his complicity in his failures. Even minor characters, such as the cruelly manipulative Monique, are fully drawn. Pinchot's delivery is as unemotional and bleak as the story. The listener knows know where this train wreck is headed but still can't help watching. N.E.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

November 1, 2010
People haunted by their own failures and lost dreams drive Vann's earnest but uneven first novel, which opens with Irene, an ailing middle-aged Alaskan woman, telling her grown daughter, Rhoda, about coming home and finding her mother "hanging from the rafters" one day when she was 10 years old. Irene also tells Rhoda that she believes her husband, Gary, wants to leave her. Gary, "a champion of regret," wanted to be an academic, but ekes out a living fishing and building boats while planning a self-imposed exile with Irene on an island in Alaska's Skilak Lake, where he's building a crude log cabin. Rhoda envisions marital bliss with her boyfriend, Jim, a philandering, selfish dentist. Their internal monologues rage with ideas and desires that read like authorial conceits, not the thoughts of real people. The only true character is Alaska itself, and Vann, author of the story collection Legend of a Suicide, is at his best depicting the harsh, rugged landscape of the Alaskan wilderness.