David Vann at the LRB

2 Feb 2011

Review of David Vann’s appearance at the London Review Bookshop, 25^th February 2011.

Scott Morris

David Vann courts publicity of a far more positive kind than that other famous, living Alaskan (“Maybe someday soon we’ll get rid of her,” he jokes at tonight’s reading). Indeed, Penguin bagged the Publishers Publicity Circle’s Award for its extensive publicity campaign for Vann’s 2009 fiction collection, Legend of a Suicide, and he begins this talk at the London Review Bookshop with a grateful nod to his publisher, for “another great job.” He is here to promote his first novel proper, Caribou Island, which revisits the themes of suicide, family and Alaskan life so central to his earlier work. Vann is a disarmingly affable and humorous speaker, and his audience (which includes confessed fan and dust-jacket acolyte, Florence Welch) is respectfully rapt throughout. Not many people in this room have read his latest novel – not published until a few days later – so it is fair to assume that a majority have come on the strength of Legend of a Suicide, or simply the legend of the author.

As Andrew Holgate, tonight’s interviewer, notes, it is hard to think of a contemporary writer whose fiction is “more marked” by his or her background than Vann’s. The suicide of his father is the legend that the narrator of his previous book struggles to come to terms with, shifting between a number of angles and voices, and the idea of self-obliteration is once again at the fore of his latest novel. Caribou Island charts the disintegration of a married couple living on the Alaskan coast – a marriage formed on Romantic ideals of the Northern wilderness that soon prove non-existent. Heavy though Vann’s themes may be, it is something of a relief to hear him discuss the darker moments of his life story with enthusiastic candour, rather than wounded angst.

Perhaps surprisingly, Vann is more interesting and engaging when questions of death and destruction are pushed to one side, and he is given space to discuss his craft. He cites the likes of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner as important influences, and Caribou Island could indeed be read as an example of a corresponding “Northern Gothic” style. His praise for Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and the “Latinate” novels of Marilynne Robinson leads to a sensitive discussion of the priority that women assume in both his life and in his writing. He is scornful of the way writers like Henry James privilege “grammar over content,” and professes a preference for action over arrangement. This does, of course, do injustice to the brittle and occasionally brilliant tautness of his prose, one key feature of his writing that stops it thawing into sentimentality (most of the time). A slightly gushing questioner veers dangerously close to labelling Vann’s writing ‘avant-garde’, which would be inaccurate, but tonight’s talk is more enjoyable for not letting Vann’s growing artistic talents go unnoticed in the shadow of his turbulent life story – a little bit of grammar in spite of the content.