Author: Tim O’Brien 1994 306 pp
My rating: 4*
Started October 29 2009, Finished October 30 2009.
Though I have by no means read all of O’Brien’s oeuvre, my sampling of it leads to the conclusion that this author has a single primary objective: coming to terms with his experience as a combat soldier in Vietnam. This suspenseful tale is no exception, addressing the issue from the POV of the veteran trying to live a “normal” life twenty years down the road. In the feeling of foreboding it generates this book reminded me of Robert Stone’s Outerbridge Reach, another novel which instilled in this reader a sense that nothing good was going to come of a man and all that water.
The book moves at a very brisk pace and scores high marks for readability -- for a serious literary undertaking, it is quite the page turner. It probably would have benefited though from a slower pace resulting from more interior development of the two main characters as I felt O’Brien was somewhat pat in conveying how they carried their repsective emotional and psychological burdens. Vietnam was the 800 pound gorilla in their lives and stretched credibility that they had not seriously addressed it in fifteen plus years of marriage.
The first word of the title had me thinking that “Of”, “At” or “By” would have worked just as well, but O’Brien seems to be disambiguating his otherwise post-modernisticly inconclusive tale with the preposition he choose.Love wasn’t enough. Which was the truth. The saddest thing of all. (177)
To know is to be disappointed. To understand is to be betrayed. All the pretty hows and whys, the unseemly motives, the obsesses of character, the sordid little uglinesses of self and history -- these were the gimmicks you kept under wraps to the end. Better to leave your audience wailing in the dark, shaking their fists, some crying How?, others Why? (246)
Swatting flies -- yes. Maybe. But still, it’s odd how the mind erases horror. (301)
My own war does not belong to me. (301)
Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. (304)
