LITR221 Forum

William Timothy O’Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota, and moved with his family to Worthington when he was ten. At Macalester College he majored in political science, completed a novel, earned election to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated summa cum laude in 1968. Almost immediately upon graduation, he was drafted into the army to serve in the Vietnam war. Although he was opposed to the war, he accepted the induction “by a sort of sleepwalking default,” as he wrote later in If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973). Serving as a foot soldier, he was mustered out with a Purple Heart earned in action near My Lai. Graduate study in government at Harvard followed, beginning in 1970, with time off for summer internships at the Washington Post in 1971 and 1972 and for a year reporting national affairs for the same paper during 1973–1974. Meanwhile, he had begun a serious consideration of the effects of war upon himself and the nation and had published his first book. In 1976 he gave up his graduate study, remaining in Cambridge as a full-time author. O’Brien’s first three books reflect the Vietnam war from different angles. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home is the full title of his first attempt, a memoir in which he tries to assess the experience, knowing that a larger than personal vision will probably escape him: “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.” In his next work, the novel Northern Lights (1974), he examines the relationship between two brothers after one of them has served in Vietnam and returned to join the other in the northern Minnesota town of their childhood. A strong work, constructed with meticulous care, it achieves its greatest power in long sections in which the brothers, lost on a skiing trip, achieve a new understanding as they struggle to survive in the wilderness. O’Brien’s third book, Going after Cacciato (1978), has been his most admired. Portions published as stories were selected as O. Henry Award winners in 1976 and 1978, and the complete book won the National Book Award in 1979. O’Brien’s next novel, The Nuclear Age (1985), treats the horror of potential nuclear disaster from the perspective of 1995. His hero, obsessed with fear from childhood, has survived forty years of the possibility of worldwide destruction. Now, by a means that looks to others like madness, he wishes to save himself and his family from civilization’s apparently headlong thrust toward oblivion. Although its message is urgent, most readers have found this novel less wholly successful than Cacciato.

Going after Cacciato is in part a demonstration of Aristotle’s idea that poetry (or fiction) is more serious than history because it presents permanent truth more accurately than any mere record of fact. Hence much of the novel reports from memory not so much how it was, but, as one of the chapter headings has it, “The Way It Mostly Was.” Hence, also, much that is reported did not happen at all except as a fantasy in the mind of the novel’s central character, who imagines pursuing Cacciato (the name is Italian for “the hunted”) out of Vietnam and across Asia 234 to Paris. A collection of linked stories of the experiences of the men of Alpha company in

Vietnam and back in the United States, The Things They Carried (1990), also explores the individual’s attempt to cope with the moral morass of war in one of O’Brien’s strongest books to date. In the Lake of the Woods (1994) is a dark novel of marriage, deceit, and the mysteries of human personality; Tomcat in Love (1998) is a dark comedy of a man’s pursuit of his wife’s lover while Vietnam continues to haunt him; and July, July (2002) is a novel of a class reunion.