Book Review: July, July, by Tim O'Brien

First Published on The Compulsive Reader.

Tim O'Brien has gained a well deserved reputation for his Viet Nam war fiction. Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried are two of the most compelling narratives to deal with the effects of that war on those condemned to fight it, indeed two of the most compelling narratives about the effects of any, and probably every, war.
Not content to be a one trick pony, O'Brien's new novel, July, July, marks his second attempt at exploring new territory. While not leaving the war behind completely, O'Brien here weaves it together with other elements as part of a larger tapestry. There is a Viet Nam veteran. There is the story of his ordeal on the banks of the Song Tra Ky. There is the picture of his life consumed by drugs, failed romance, and the loss of a leg. But this is only one of the stories of blighted lives and wasted promise.

In an interview (http://www.readersread.com/features/timobrien.htm), O'Brien point out he as much interested in the fact that ordinary everyday life goes on even in the face of historical cataclysms. Those who didn't fight go on living. Yet in some sense, even from this perspective, the war may well be the two ton gorilla in the novel.

July, July uses the thirtieth reunion of Class of 1969 of Darton Hall College in Minnesota as a frame for individual stories focusing on critical moments in the past of ten of the celebrating alumni. Usually, after each story, the reader is brought back to the reunion for a glance at how these children of the war years have turned out. We see them before we know their individual stories, and we see them after; we see them singly, and we see them as part of the group. We see them as individuals, and we see them as representatives of an era. In a sense the hero of the novel is the Class of '69.

It takes a few pages to get beyond the confusion of which name goes with which character, but unless the author provides a general prologue in which each parades past to the tune of a lively character sketch, such confusion is inevitable. Yet since O'Brien deftly defines each with telling strokes--the pot bellied mop manufacturer, the alluring temptress with two husbands and a lover, the female minister fired from her pulpit for house breaking--the early confusion is kept to a manageable minimum.

As in any group some characters, some stories are more memorable than others. Everybody can't be the Wife of Bath. Dorothy Steir is a rock ribbed Republican with a pool and a house and a patio, trying to come to terms with a radical mastectomy. Ellie Abbot sneaks off for an affair only to have her companion drown in a lake while she watches from the shore. David Todd loses a leg in Viet Nam and a wife on Christmas morning ten years later.

July, July however is not simply a collection of stories set in a frame to keep them neatly in place a la Boccacio or the Arabian Nights. These are works in which it is the individual tale--the part, rather than the whole-- that is focus. July, July tries to knit stories and characters together so that the whole is something more than the sum of its parts.

Stories complement one another. If one character goes to war and wrecks his life, another runs off to Canada, and though he manages to avoid the war, becomes no less an emotional cripple. If they marry at all, they marry the wrong people. If they are successful in their careers, they find that success unfullfilling. No matter what they have, they always seem to want something else, more often than not something they cannot have.

Spook Spinelli, class tramp, is a good example. She has one husband, she wants another. She gets a second, she wants a lover. She gets him and she still comes to the reunion looking for something more. Marv Bertel, he of the mops and bellies, on the other hand, wants only one thing--Spook, and he's wanted her for thirty one years. Spook may never get what she wants because she is not really aware of what it is; Marv knows exactly what he wants, although one is tempted to wonder if he would be happy if he ever got it.

Still they could dream: "And then for some time they fantasized, taking turns at inventing a happy ending for themselves. . . .It had become the ninth day of July, Sunday ,just before three in the morning, a new age, a new century, and for both Marv Bertel and Spook Spinelli, the turbulent world of their youth had receded like some idle threat or long-lapsed promise. Nixon was dead. Westmoreland was in retirement. That war was over. Now there were new wars. But still, as with Spook and Marv and several million other survivors of their times, there would also be the essential renewing fantasy of splendid things to come." (pp, 318-319)

These "survivors of their times" come to the reunion looking for something of that splendid promise that never quite came. Some find it, not always where they expected, but find it nonetheless. Of course, whether what they find is something lasting is another question. Some go home as empty handed as they came.

July, 1969, as the author reminds us, was a year of miracles. There were the amazing Mets. There were men walking on the moon. It was a time when the world was all before us. The class of '69 was graduated into a world where anything and everything seemed possible. July, 2000, when they come together once again, that optimism seems little more than naive.

Even if you live in a house in the suburbs, even if your husband is a senior vice president at Cargill with a matched set of Volvos and you've canvassed your neighborhood for Ronald Reagan, you can still wake up to find that your husband can't bring himself to look at the scar where your breast used to be. You can find kinship with a Viet Nam veteran shot in both feet, with a prosthesis where his leg ought to be. And if you find yourself walking home alone in a drugged euphoria in the middle of the night, there may well be some who are finding comfort in each other, even as you have found some comfort.

If July, July never quite reaches the heights of O'Brien's best work, it is a much more successful piece of fiction than Tom Cat in Love, his last attempt to stretch his horizons and a book that bodes well for future attempts.

The Art of the Art of War: Tim O'Brien

This article was first published at The Compulsive Reader.

Francis Ford Coppola finding it necessary to explain and perhaps justify the "reduxing" of Apocalypse Now talks about the addition of forty nine minutes of footage not used in the original as providing a fuller and presumably more accurate experience of the moral insanity that was Vietnam. Now while in 1979 that might well have been a worthy endeavor, one wonders if, with the passage of time, that particular message has been made superfluous having been repeated many times over the ensuing twenty years.

And though it is certainly important to take a moral position on war in general as well as on each and every particular war, to create a work of art that points out that war is hell is not exactly what you would call breaking new ground. Who is it out there saying that war is a good thing, that what we need is more wars? Even the military today see it as a last resort, something to be avoided if possible, at least for public consumption. And to point out that a war some thirty odd years old was an evil nightmare, while useful from the doomed to relive forgotten history school of thought, some would argue is more propaganda than moral imperative.

War has spawned works of art, great and not so great, and the measure of that greatness was not necessarily the message they espoused. If Homer glories in its heroes, Joseph Heller rails at its insanities, all twenty two of them. For every Wilfred Owen, there's a charging light brigade; for every saved Private Ryan, there's a Gunga Din. For every Henry V, there are a few good men. Still the message of a work of art has to be a significant part of its value.
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One of the most memorable "anti war" stories I ever read never mentions war. It's about a dentist. William Carlos Williams' short story "The Use of Force" - popular some forty or so years ago, shows how using force even for good, dehumanizes those who use it. The dentist prying open a terrified little girl's mouth to fix her teeth becomes a brutalizing monster no matter how well intentioned he might have been when he started.

And is this not the point of Apocalypse Now? When you descend to the heart of darkness you do not return unscathed. The horror that you find contaminates. That was Conrad's vision and it is that vision that forms the mythic underpinning of Coppola's film. War is hell and when you descend into hell something happens and that something is not good. Like Kurtz, you become the savage you sought to civilize. At best you become callous, indifferent, at worst you become a butcher, a beast. The hell of war is as much about what killing does to the killer as it is about the killing itself.

And while Col. Kurtz may have been the best the army had produced, indeed like Conrad's Kurtz the best that Western civilization has produced, - a poet warrior in the classic sense - like his namesake, he has found the horror and it is him.
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Which brings me to Tim O'Brien.

The first I read of Tim O'Brien were some selections from his novel (some would call it a short story collection), The Things They Carried. One story particularly caught my attention: "The Lives of the Dead." Like the Williams story it is not so much about war or even force, it is about how one deals with the horrors that war brings. But the significant thing about this story is that it recognizes that these horrors are not the special province of war alone, they are in fact part of the baggage of everyday life. O'Brien does this by counterpointing the deaths of his war buddies against the death of a nine year old girl, his first date, from cancer. Ultimately the story asks what is it we can turn to, to help us to deal with these horrors we all must face.

And there is an answer: ". . .in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."

It is in art that there is solace in a world where youth is no defense against death and
insanity becomes the norm: "I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive. . . .She's not the embodied Linda; she's mostly made up. . . .Her real name doesn't matter. She was nine years old. I loved her and she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I'm gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all. . . .I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story."

Linda, his comrades in Vietnam, the author himself, their lives are saved in the story, in the imagination.
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This is not simply ars longa in modern dress, nor is it escapism. For O'Brien there is salvation in art. Indeed that is the central theme of his 1979 National Book Award winning novel, Going After Cacciato. Paul Berlin, the voice of the novel, sitting alone in the isolation of guard duty in Vietnam, sends his unit off in his mind in pursuit of an AWOL Cacciato who has set off on foot for Paris. "Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea. . . and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination. A truly awesome notion. Not a dream, an idea. An idea to develop, to tinker with and build and sustain, to draw out as an artist draws out his vision." It is in the imagination, then, that there is a reason to go on living in the face of the absurd horror that is war, that is life.
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Imagination creates golden helmets out of barber's trays, giants out of windmills, and glorious Dulcineas; it takes all that is ignoble and horrifying in this life and makes of it something beautiful and noble. It transforms a strange almost simple soldier walking off into the night and away from battle into a holy grail floating always just beyond the reach of those taking up the quest. Like Arthur's knights, Berlin imagines that he and his unit are on a quest, seeking an ideal that is always to be strived for but never reached, and it is the imagining that is important, because in the imagining there is sanity.

They can travel the paddies and mountains of Vietnam, the streets of Mandalay, move from Asia to Europe and eventually to Paris always with the moon faced Cacciato one step ahead, not quite catchable. But catching Cacciato really isn't important, imagining going after Cacciato is essential.
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Tim O'Brien was in Vietnam. He knows what he writes about and that knowledge is evident on every page of his book, and one thing he knows is that war is hell, but when you are the one stuck in the middle of one with your buddies dying around you, saying so isn't really all that useful.

And herein lies the difference between Coppola and O'Brien. What Coppola shows us is that war is hell, and it contaminates everyone who participates in it. What O'Brien shows us is how to keep that from happening. He shows us how to live sanely when living is intolerable, and this is a lesson worth learning, for there is the intolerable in life, even when the war is over.

O'Brien shows us how not to be a Kurtz.