21 Jan 2011 01:29:47
First-time novelist David Vann, a former magazine journalist and author of a well-regarded short story collection also about Alaska, crafts beautiful sentences. He's also capable of keen insight into the motivation of his damaged characters, and certainly well-rendered tragedy has a rich tradition in literature.
But even Shakespeare sneaked a few jokes into "Hamlet." Vann's novel is compelling at times and even occasionally spellbinding, but he fails to leaven the relentless darkness of his characters' circumstances long enough to make us truly care about them.
Vann's Alaska shares little with the idyllic frontier of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" TV show. It's a bleak wasteland peopled by losers and lost souls: "the end of the world, a place of exile," Vann writes. "Those who couldn't fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn't cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge."
Two of those exiles are Gary and Irene, married about 30 years and now in late middle age. Gary, a failed scholar of medieval literature, is prone to hatching grandiose plans that collapse into disappointment — not the least of which was his decision to move to Alaska early in the marriage.
Three decades later, the relationship is sustained only by grudges and petty suspicions, with Irene — a recently retired preschool teacher — burying her deep unhappiness inside a shell of bitter sarcasm.
But even Shakespeare sneaked a few jokes into "Hamlet." Vann's novel is compelling at times and even occasionally spellbinding, but he fails to leaven the relentless darkness of his characters' circumstances long enough to make us truly care about them.
Vann's Alaska shares little with the idyllic frontier of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" TV show. It's a bleak wasteland peopled by losers and lost souls: "the end of the world, a place of exile," Vann writes. "Those who couldn't fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn't cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge."
Two of those exiles are Gary and Irene, married about 30 years and now in late middle age. Gary, a failed scholar of medieval literature, is prone to hatching grandiose plans that collapse into disappointment — not the least of which was his decision to move to Alaska early in the marriage.
Three decades later, the relationship is sustained only by grudges and petty suspicions, with Irene — a recently retired preschool teacher — burying her deep unhappiness inside a shell of bitter sarcasm.
