Caribou Island: where speech marks have gone extinct

Quotations marks, like in many recent years, have gone awol in this month’s Reading Group choice, David Vann’s Caribou Island. Does it free prose up to reach poetic heights, or is it harmful tinkering?

“You do know something,” said James Ellroy when speaking to David Vann at the London Review Bookshop a few months ago. “You are a knowledgeable motherfucker. But you don’t use quotation marks. Which invalidates your career – and your life.”

I suspect these words may chime with a few contributors on last week’s Reading Group thread. One of the very first posts came from MythicalMagpie who asked:

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