O'Brien never disappoints. His skills as a writer dazzle and compel, and he tackles the big topics, Definitely worth a read. I liked it. The writing is beautiful, the description fantastic and truly places me into the horrors and life of the protagonist, and it's challenging, But it was hard to follow, jumping from event to event, the thoughts and focus so random, It may have been an attempt to introduce the schizophrenic mind, Tim O'Brien explores the inner thoughts of someone confronting the dawn of the nuclear age, Interesting, but not my favorite O'Brien book possibly my least favorite I definitely loved The Things They Carried, enjoyed Going After Cacciato, also enjoyed In the Lake Of the Woods.
Maybe I've read too many O'Brien novels and don't find them as interesting now, The book is a great history of mans insane attempts to achieve something that has buried us all in the past and in the future.
This is about a Guy who spends his life trying to prevent death, But it always comes, and the only way to deal with it is to live, have a little faith and hope that it won't come.
The story switches back and forth from his childhood/early adulthood, and the present, As a young boy with caring parents growing up in Utah, the protagonist suffers from anxiety about war and death, hiding under the ping pong table at an early age.
As a young adult, he dodges the war, and spends several years as part of a fringe, or not so fringe group think Antifa/BLM, as a money carrier, funding not so peaceful protests.
Think bombs.
As an adult, who ironically made money in uranium, he spends his retirement digging a hole to make a bomb shelter in his back yard, estranging both his wife and daughter.
Tim Obrien is a wonderfully diverse writer, While all four of his novels that I have read have significant Vietnam war themes, only The Things They Carried and Finding Cacciato actually center on the war.
In the Lake of the Woods was a mystery/thriller, and The Nuclear Age was a somewhat comical, modern novel, I like that he stays
above the political fray, and focuses on the emotional toll of the soldiers, of which he was one, Not my cup of tea hung in there to finish out of curiosity and the ending was definitely not worth it, Have much respect for Tim O'Brien and other books of his, though, I'm a big fan of O'Brien, I've taught his work, Things and Into the Lake of the Woods are classics, but I have to admit that this one didn't really work for me.
It's well written, and has some wonderful lines "In a sense, I realized, cheerleaders are terrorists, All that zeal and commitment, " "Parents could be absolutely merciless, They just kept coming at you, wearing you down, grinding away until you finally crumbled, " It has valid psychological insights, even amidst the exaggeration and satire, It expresses the Dantesque view that everything is motivated by love, even when that converts to the fear of the loss of love, I get that. Elements of firstrate fiction.
My first issue is with the tone, This seems to be going for Antrim/Leithauser/Vonnegutish satire, with a hapless POV character struggling to make sense of the world, That can be a tricky path to follow, since something needs to keep the reader interested, I lost interest.
Second, we have an unreliable narrator, and he's mentally unstable, As an aside, I've been reading too many literary stories in the last few months where the POV is mentally unstable, DSMX is nonfiction. If the diagnosis is the theme, I don't see the point, Also, he's a jackass even if he's shy and unselfcertain, He keeps enabling killing, while begging off when the responsibility gets too close, This does not make me care,
Third, since the narrator is unreliable, and sees things that aren't there, and since "imagination" keeps coming up, we basically can't really tell how much of this story is "real.
" It could all be one of his dreams, and boy is that a bad cliché, It's hard to retain interest when you don't trust, or even like, the narrator, and don't know if the story can be taken seriously anyway.
And if it can't, then we're back to whatever DSM Manual was in effect that year,
Fourth, we have the plot and thematic material for a long short story, which seems stretched into a novel, Basic story is the guy is digging a hole in the backyard, and we have to personify the hole and give it dialogue, and cram in aboutpages of backstory which is far more interesting than the hole to get a book.
So, it's thin, and very, very repetitive, It's nice that some of the repetitions are meant to be structural, but it's very repetitive, still,
Fifth, the story involves a manic pixie dream girl, the sexiest cheerleader from high school and then college who, of course, falls for our hapless narrator.
Hunh. That trope is okay for a movie, but it wears thin at novel length, at least for me, And then, guess what, we get a second manic dream girl, with pixie features, I pretty much threw in the towel at that point,
And that brings me back to the tone, This is overthetop, but it sticks to the style of deadpan realism, so it was impossible for me to buy in to the overthetopness because it wasn't arch enough, often enough.
Antrim, in Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is a great example of getting that balance right,
So the experience was that many of the pages were engaging, but it kept running off the rails, Not my cup of tea, A thoughtprovoking read, for sure, But then O'Brien doesn't disappoint. An aimless and rambling novel about a mentally troubled man building a shelter and looking back, Tim O'Brien's writing style is pretty much the only reason to read this, And even then the lack of real insight in Cowling and the failure to really examine why he ran with the underground much less his family dynamic make this a pretty embarrassing volume.
Really enjoyed O'Brien's writing style, which unfortunately is the only thing that kept me going through the plodding backflash sections which took up most of the book.
At times the dialogue was a bit unbelievable, a tad too witty and rapidfire, I found the protagonist's choices about the women in his life confusing and at times his decisions and motivations made him hard to care about.
This isn't as strong as O'Brien's other work sections of it feel like incomplete drafts, like he left them to be developed later but never got around to actuall doing that.
The extended flashback, which takes up most of the novel, is potent and draws big emotions from small brushstrokes, which is typical of O'Brien at his best.
The presentday framing device, though, didn't engage me and I thought the wife and daughter characters weren't too convincing, I think this book is about how some people come to develop a fear that never leaves them, and how crippling such a fear can be in terms of the choices they make and how that fear clouds their minds.
And it's also about love and the seemingly strange things we'll do to find it and the seeming randomness in how we come to feel love.
. . or not come to feel love,
I read this after reading O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato," which seemed almost entirely a fantasy, and now I'm starting to wonder how much of this is supposed to take place in the narrator's mind, as well.
The premise is so strange and so are some of the characters' behaviors, One character, the therapist, may be fabricated maybe I'm not sure and yet he keeps popping up in the book,
Really, though, we are meant to wonder how much of the events actually take place because we have an unreliable narrator who must tell himself throughout the book that he's not crazy.
And the book is a little crazy in the sense that the timeline is all over the place, with I bet over half of it taking place as flashbacks.
And the author expertly weaves them together, even suggesting life itself is not a linear function regarding time:
I have a theory.
As you get older, as the years pile up, time takes on a curious Doppler effect, an alteration in the relative velocity of human events and human consciousness.
The frequencies tighten up. The wavelengths shortensound and light and historyits all compressed, At the age of twelve, when you crouch under a PingPong table, a single hour seems to unwind toward infinity, dense and slow at twentyfive, or thirtyfive or forty, approaching halflife, the divisions of remaining time are fractionally reduced, like Zenos arrow, and the world comes rushing at you, and away from you, faster and faster.
It confounds computation. You lose your life as you live it, accelerating,
I found this to be a sad book full of sad characters who intend to do sad things, But the ending is kind of hopeful and beautiful,
spoiler upcoming, turn away now if you haven't read this and wish to
CAUTION: spoiler, TURN AWAY NOW, . .
This quote below is almost at the very end of the book, not at its climax because the book essentially has no climax.
I find it to be a statement not just on the narrator choosing not to commit the awful crime but also a statement on humanity itself, which is full of risks and dangers that could turn people away from wanting to experience humanity at all, but we're human so we try to see past those risks and dangers:
I know the ending.
One day it will happen, One day we will see flashes, all of us, One day my daughter will die, One day, I know, my wife will leave me, It will be autumn, perhaps, and the trees will be in color, and she will kiss me in my sleep and tuck a poem in my pocket, and the world will surely end.
I know this, but I believe otherwise, Because there is also this day, which will be hot and bright,
So as Covidpromises to try and end humanity as we have come to know it here in the U, S. and promises to try and killmillion people worldwide, we believe otherwise because there is also this day, and it looks like a damn fine one at the moment.
maybe it's when i read this but the portrayals of the women felt so hard and not great to me, from Sarah to Bobbi and then the girls locked in the room when the main character has his breakdown,
I liked best the descriptions of his family growing up, especially his dad, and all the relationships between physical and emotional feelings.
Those were really good, and the existential fear,.On Sunday, Mayth,, the oceanfront town of Lincoln City, OR set a record temperature ofdegrees, I know, both because I read about it and because I was there, This heat spike,degrees above average, filled an Oregon coast most often described and rightfully praised as brooding or atmospheric with more bouncing bikinis than the whole state typically sees in a year.
Beach volleyball was played. Bodies were tanned. For a brief, sundazzled flicker, Oregon put on our best California sundress,
And it made us nervous, and not just because were not used to showing so much fogtossed fishskin so early in the season.
Weather has become impossible to enjoy under these circumstances, not just because I picked up one of the worst sunburns of my life probably due to the sheer impossibility of sunburn on the Oregon coast in early May, but because of the peculiar sense of meteorological menace with which we have been infected.
Weather is not weather now it is the harbinger of something else, each outlier event less a cause for celebration itsdegrees in May! as despair its HAPPENING!.
I caught myself repeating the same thought over and over within the mechanics of catching and throwing a frisbee again and again “This is the warmest it has ever been, ever.
This the warmest it has ever been, ever, ”
Assuming for the moment that the panicking climatologists are not the architects of a grand Democratic feint against freedom or the agents of a Satanic New World Order, it is not at all irrational to view each outlying weather event, especially on the warm side, as another far off gunshot signaling darker things to come, food shortages and killer tornadoes and endless droughts and mass extinctions, all of which are allegedly just far enough over the horizon that my kids will have to deal with it even if Im lucky enough to check out just prior.
The premise may not necessarily compel the conclusion, but the conclusion still hangs around, looking worried and keeping us all up at night, So if it is then also true that this pending tipping point, catastrophic feedback loop or whatever is already on its way or basically inescapable, both because of the lag in meteorological response time and due to our apparent incapacity to take specieswide collective action, it is again entirely rational to wonder how best to respond to the possibility if not likelihood that you will soon be living through the apocalypse.
Of course, how you process this information is up to you,
I see the most obvious option as looking about like this, much simplified:
Most of us will simply ignore the possibility of the Bad Thing About To Happen and continue to live as though the threat is fictional.
Thinking about the apocalypse is profoundly selfnullifying unless you are Tom Cruise or Frodo Baggins, in which case it is profoundly selfaggrandizing, For the rest of us, climate change is something to be experienced as a spectator, a victim and, ultimately, a statistic, The heroic narratives of rescue and redemption will occur, but most of us will be excluded, While we are, of course, “all to blame”, this blame is too dilute to prompt any real feeling of guilt or action and besides, AND BESIDES, what you do wont matter unless everyone else does it too, and they wont, so you wont either.
Buying a better lightbulb makes you feel better, sure, but it hardly offsets your car and refrigerator, not to mention the millions of cars and refrigerators the Chinese, Brazilians and Indians want and deserve just as much as you do.
Easiest best not to think about it,
Of course, you could just build a bunker,
sitelinkTim O Briens “The Nuclear Age” takes the second approach, Swapping in Vietnams specter of nuclear annihilation for climate change, OBriens protagonist William appears in nonchronological snapshots as a scared child cowering underneath a pingpong table lined with pencils the lead will fight off the radiation, as a protoemo teenager holding a sign reading “THE BOMBS ARE REAL” at the school cafeteria, as a failed adult revolutionary and draft dodger and, most significantly, as a middle aged man digging an underground bunker out from the guts of his suburban lawn while his daughter looks on and his wife starts packing her bags.
Of course, like every book by OBrien, this one is really about Vietnam, but also about the smallness of knowledge and the impossibility of connecting with anyone, the intensely private nature of trauma and the inescapable feeling that nobody really gets it, even and especially the people who were there or who are supposed to be in charge.
Sandwiched chronologically between sitelinkGoing After Cacciato and sitelinkThe Things They Carried, both probably superior, The Nuclear Age mostly ditches the open warfare between the narrator and the reader as to the impossibility of telling a true war story and instead shrugs and tells a story that isnt true at all.
OBrien has never been good with dialogue and The Nuclear Age is a particularly bad example every character talks with the same voice, a clipped, overly pithy distance that Ive always taken as suggesting just how bad we are at even basic selfexpression, especially to the people we care about.
William uses words to avoid communicating, Bobbi, his wife, communicates only with crappy poetry, There are more adventurous interludes interspersed throughout involving his association with a band of lowlevel pseudo revolutionaries, all of which seem false, another Cacciato style trick to headfake an action movie plotline to make an emotional or psychological point, and not as well executed.
So why four: Its hard to argue with the guy, If the bombs are real, digging a hole is as valid a response as any, OBrien considers and rejects the possibility of revolt, acquiescence, complicity, The Nuclear Age is happy to wonder if insanity and wellpreparedness might necessarily overlap and allows us to be fully frustrated with our options.
We will, he argues, all eventually be caught fatally flatfooted when the typhoon comes, even if we were warned repeatedly of its coming, Better to dig a hole, put your wife in it with you, and go to sleep, Rational paranoia, wellfounded crazy. People get dangerous when theyre desperate, and the people who arent desperate arent being honest with themselves,
This theme goes rancid in sitelinkThe Lake of the Woods, published several years later, and a book so dark that OBriens publishers apparently told him to cool it with the nailchewing PTSD afterward he wrote a string of yucky romances and ultimately retired to academia.
I wont spoil the punchline of The Lake of the Woods, but it overextends the possibility introduced here into something close to horror all of this anxiety can easily spill its banks and drown your friends and neighbors, but one of the great tricks of this narrative is that you never quite get whether this is ultimately a tale of redemption or of double murder.
Im not recommending Lake of the Woods its not quite worth the endless heebiejeebies but I feel like it goes all of the way.
The Nuclear Age ultimately blinks in the face of its own obsession with annihilation, OBrien writes one book just one, that one without a flicker of a blink, But this one certainly goes down easier, .