Butler makes a habit of reading Tim O'Brien's "In the Lake of the Woods" every few years. Not because he forgets the plot; he can tell you the story beat by beat. Now he just tries to understand how O'Brien does it. There's Vietnam . And magic. And politics. And a marriage. And a disappearance --- or is it a murder? How O'Brien masterfully juggles all those balls is one of the most impressive achievements in modern American fiction.
Which is another way of saying: You won't put it down. [George W. Bush didn't. Back in the days before he became President --- and stopped reading newspapers, to say nothing of books --- he liked to talk about " Lake of the Woods" as one of his favorite books. Go figger.]
So you'd think Butler would have gone on to read the other two parts of what could be called O'Brien's Vietnam trilogy --- "Going After Cacciato," the novel that won the National Book Award for O'Brien, and "The Things They Carried ."
But until recently, Butler never looked back at these early books.
Then Butler went to Costa Rica --- into the rain forest, actually --- and because that climate is so much like Vietnam, he took along the paperback of "The Things They Carried." One afternoon, when the temperature was 95 and so was the humidity, Butler sat down with this collection of short stories. Two hours and 271 pages later, he got up.
You don't get better reading experiences than that.
What's so great? The people. O'Brien delivers a company of American soldiers during the Vietnam war with unsentimental tenderness: the guy who will get his head blown off seconds after smoking a joint, the guy who will commit suicide years after the war, the guy who will die in the muck, the guys who will find him --- and the Vietnamese soldier O'Brien kills. There is no larger war, no deeper significance. Life has been reduced to a jungle and these men.
If we were talking about fiction, we would say something like, 'The voice of the narrator is strong and authentic.' But this is something else: memoir served up as fiction. And so the stories read like confessions. Because, in fact, they are.
And no one seems to have more to confess than the narrator, who is, in these pages, called "Tim O'Brien" and who is, I believe, no mere device. In l968, O'Brien was about to graduate with honors from college in Minnesota . He had won a fellowship to Harvard. And then he was drafted.
The story that resonates most for Butler --- because he was also graduating from college in l968 --- is "On the Rainy River." In it, O'Brien tries to figure out whether to flee to Canada or face his fate in Vietnam . He has a summer job in his home town in Minnesota ; abruptly, he flees and drives north, north toward the border. He gets as far as a lodge before he runs out of courage. No one is there but the aged proprietor, who instinctively knows that this young man is in the throes of crisis.
The old man doesn't invite O'Brien to talk about his problem, in that new-fangled Oprah way. He just takes him out fishing, and pretends not to notice that O'Brien is sitting there weeping. But his silence means everything: O'Brien makes his decision, and, even more, knows why he made it.
The story ends with O'Brien driving home: 'The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam , where I was a soldier. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.'
In fact, Tim O'Brien did not really head for the border; he dutifully took the bus to the induction center. But the fiction has the power of truthful insight: "I was a coward. I went to the war." Indeed, that's the book in two sentences. But unlike many quickie summaries, it makes you want to read the book. Which Butler now does, once a year, year after year.
--- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com
To buy "The Things They Carried" from Amazon.com, click here.
