The day before "Caribou Island" hit the top of my pile, a friend warned me off reading it. "Unexceptional ... doesn't have the colour I think you respond to" were her words. My wife then warned me off "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher", saying it "read like a dissertation--history, not story". My wife's caution hit the mark: I thought it was a story with a narrator and characters, not an impersonal recitation of history, so it's going back to the library tomorrow.

"Caribou Island", however, I enjoyed. I struggle to say that is an endorsement that you should read the book, because so rarely have I felt so personal a response to a book. I can see how my friend was unimpressed--Vann's style is unadorned, action is slow, and it's not a light fun read. What I took, I took because the protrusions of the book's characters fit the recesses of my life's shape.

I say "not fun" because every character in the book is flawed. The least fucked-up is an incidental character, gone before you know it. The novel is built on crumbling relationships: father and mother being torn apart by the father's Quixotic quest to build a cabin on the unfriendly shores of an Alaskan lake, and their kids: their daughter who is about to settle down with a dentist, their son who is a stoner fisherman.

And through it all, the cloying and oppressive presence of Alaska. Wind and snow on lakes and mountains, gravel roads, the heavy weight of the approaching winter, the sensations of being cold and wet and wind-chilled. Beyond the physical, the spiritual presence of Alaska, where everyone's a fuckup and all the good people have left.

Within this environment of despair, the crumbling relationships decay before your eyes with a sense of inevitability. Poisonous conversation follows interior resentment follows bad decision until you can easily believe that nothing can ever go right for these people here in this place.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. Vann wrote about a similar situation: suicides, Alaska, failed father with heavy burden of inadequacy, resentful separating couples, and more in his previous book of short stories. They're semi-autobiographical, but I hope that Vann's next book is not also about suicides. It feels a little like being in someone else's therapy session, and now he's gone twice to the well I hope he won't return.

As with the earlier book, I identified with the father, flaws and all. I recognized the mother. I could see how I could have been the dentist. This is the personal response I talked about earlier: the characters were credibly flawed, I felt like I'd met those fuckups or could easily *be* those fuckups. I learned about myself by reading about them. I can't guarantee you will learn about yourself in Caribou Island, but I can guarantee it will cure you of wanting to move to Alaska.