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Reviews by Marc Leepson
Tobias Wolff is best known for his creative nonfiction. His
memoirs, This Boy’s Life (1989), which ends just
as he’s about to ship out to Vietnam, and In Pharaoh’s
Army (1994), his sharply drawn in-country story, have received
sterling reviews, and the former was made into a respectable
1993 Hollywood movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert
De Niro. But Wolff, a former Green Beret who teaches writing
at Stanford, also is one hell of a short story writer.
Wolff’s
latest book, Our Story Begins: New
and Selected Stories (Knopf, 379 pp., $26.95) includes 21 “selected” stories;
that is, tales taken from his three short fiction collections,
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Back
in the World (1985), and The Night in Question (1996). The
eleven “new” stories in the new book have been
published in such magazines as The New Yorker, Playboy, and
Esquire, and in literary journals such as Triquarterly and
The Missouri Review.
Which is to say that I had read virtually
every one of these stories before—and liked them very
much. The good news is that that they all stood up on second
reading. Wolff creates one or two sharply drawn, compelling
characters and puts them through fast-paced, intriguing stories
that quickly come to a fascinating (if sometimes inconclusive)
end. These stories are set in many different locations: college
campuses, Army bases, prep schools, rural areas, cities.
A few deal
with Vietnam veterans. But these aren’t
Vietnam War stories. They are three decades worth of first-rate
short fiction from one of the greatest literary lights of
our generation.
DEFIANT MEN
Patrick McGrath’s excellent new novel, Trauma (Knopf,
224 pp., $24.95), bores deeply into the psyche of protagonist
Charlie Weir, a New York City psychiatrist who specializes
in treating people with post-traumatic stress disorder. In
the ’80s, the young shrink feels an obligation to help
psychologically damaged Vietnam veterans, and one of the
book’s main plot points involves Weir’s work
with veterans and the repercussions in his own life following
the suicide of one of the men, a guy who happened to be his
brother-in-law.
McGrath creates a tense, fast-moving story—one
that feels real. That’s especially true with his depictions
of Weir’s rap groups and the emotional tribulations
of the veteran who ends it all.
Weir looks back on the group
of a dozen or more veterans “sitting
in a rough circle,” he says. “I see them grinning
as though for a group photo, each of those emotionally shattered
but still defiant men in their T-shirts and blue jeans, their
baseball caps, their tattoos, men in their twenties mostly
who’d seen what no human should ever have to see and
the pain of it stamped on their faces like boot prints.”
There
is no stereotyping here. The characters feel all too real.
This is not an easy task, but McGrath handles it effortlessly
in this compelling, haunting novel.
FICITION IN BRIEF
Daniel Buckman showed off a gritty style in his first novel,
Waters in Darkness (2001), a post-Vietnam War story that
dealt with that war’s legacy and the present-day military.
Buckman, who was born in 1967 and is a former 82nd Airborne
Division trooper, has a jaded, dysfunctional Vietnam veteran
as a main player in his latest novel, Because
the Rain (Picador,
224 pp., $15, paper). This one’s a very dark affair,
set in Chicago, in which every character is weak, corrupt,
screwed-up, violent, or a combination of the above. That
includes a high-class, beautiful young Vietnamese prostitute.
Miriam
Herin’s first novel, Absolution (Novello Festival
Press, 320 pp., $22.95), is a well-crafted, well-told tale
that deals with the present-day murder of a Vietnam veteran
(by a young Vietnamese immigrant) and the veteran’s
wife’s search for answers to questions involving his
war-time deeds. It includes well-rendered scenes in the jungles
of Vietnam.
J.A. Gasperetti served as a draftee with the Army’s
4th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1966-67. So does the
hero, Gil Landon, of Gasperetti’s new novel, Landon’s
Odyssey (Author House, 478 pp., $20.95, paper). Gasperetti
evokes that time and place in the war in this sprawling tale,
which focuses on Landon’s difficult post-war readjustment,
and how he deals with it—namely by going on a quest
to deliver six letters from his war buddies.
Carl Nelson,
a Naval Academy graduate, served four tours in Vietnam; today
he’s an accomplished writer. Nelson’s
newest thriller, the fast-paced Madam
President and the Admiral (New Century Press, 270 pp., $16.95, paper), hones in on
the repercussions of China shooting down a U.S. Navy jet
in the South China Sea.
POETRY
The most-honored poet who served in the Vietnam War, Yusef
Komunyakaa (who has a Pulitzer Prize for poetry under his
literary belt), recently published a dramatic adaptation
of Gilgamesh, the epic, ancient Middle Eastern tale often
known as “the world’s oldest story.” The
book (Wesleyan, 110 pp., $22.95) is a collaboration with
theater producer Chad Garcia.
The much-honored poet John Balaban’s
latest collection, Path, Crooked Path (Cooper Canyon, 77
pp., $15, paper), contains several war-related works, including “Loving
Graham Greene,” a glimpse into the mind of a Vietnam
veteran, which is dedicated to the famed Vietnam War correspondent
and Vietnam veterans’ advocate, the late Gloria Emerson.
Balaban, who is perhaps best known for his translations of
traditional Vietnamese poetry, is poet in residence and a
professor of English at North Carolina State University.
Kenneth
R. Taylor’s book of remembrances and poetry,
Vietnam Remembered: My Journey (58 pp., $10, paper), is the
result of a vow by the former member of the 1st Cavalry Division’s
227th Assault Helicopter Battalion to a fellow soldier that
whoever made it back home alive would tell the other’s
family about what happened in the war. For more info, write
to Taylor at 152 Cold Spring Rd., Lewistown, PA 17044.
Marjorie
A. Brockman’s Letters, Medals,
Roses (Trafford,
39 pp., $13.50, paper) contains poems based on long conversations
the author has had over the years with Vietnam veterans,
as well as her experiences attending veterans parades, reunions,
and ceremonies. The seeds for the book were planted with
the author’s participation in the 1986 Chicago Welcome
Home Parade.
Boston University English Professor James Anderson
Winn’s
The Poetry of War (Cambridge University Press, 320 pp., $24.99)
is a long essay on centuries of versifying about war, from
Homer to Bruce Springsteen. Winn quotes from Tim O’Brien
about the Vietnam War, and looks closely at the Vietnam War
era work of the poet Phillip Appleman. Lorrie Goldensohn’s
Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century
Soldier Poetry, which
includes the author’s
examination of Vietnam War poetry, first published in 2003,
in now out in paperback (Oxford University Press, 382 pp.,
$21).
Ed Salven’s affecting book of poetic “episodes
and meditations,” The Soldier
Factory (Braziller, 160
pp., $24.95), is based on an experience the one-time U.S.
Army 1968 draftee had when, more than 30 years later, he
visited the now-defunct Fort Ord, the “soldier factory,” where
he was stationed. Salven illustrates his versification with
photographs and painted portraits of soldiers by college
students done in 1994, the year the base closed.
Many of the
poems in Jack Moser’s The Murmur
of a Gentle Breeze (Fithian Press, 136 pp., $15, paper) are based on
Moser’s Navy tour of duty in Vietnam and his work as
a psychotherapist and counselor. The poems in Jack L. Thomas’ Whirling
Fire (lyndonjacks, 96 pp., $14, paper) are based on the author’s
1969-70 tour of duty as a Mobile Advisory Team officer with
the RF/PFs near the Cambodian border. For more info, go to
www.lyndonjacks.com
Mark Grothier’s Poetry of Mark
Grothier (TDR, 86 pp., paper) contains four poems based on the author’s
U.S. Air Force experiences. For more info, email tdrpublishing@bis.midco.net
The
current issue (Vol. 19, No. 1 & 2, 2007) of WLA:
War, Literature & the Arts, the literary journal published
by the U.S. Air Force Academy, contains the Vietnam War-influenced
poetry of U.S. Air Force veteran (1966-69) Dale Ritterbush,
who is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
The issue also includes a wide-ranging discussion on the
subject of war poetry between Ritterbush and Jackson A. Niday
II. For an on-line look, go to www.WLAjournal.com
BECTON
ON BECTON
In Becton: Autobiography of a Solider
and Public Servant (Naval Institute, 336 pp., $29.95), retired Army Lt. Gen.
Julius W. Becton, Jr., offers up a creditable look at his
eventful and remarkable life.
The book focuses on Becton’s
sterling 40-year (1943-83) Army career in which he served
with distinction in three wars. That includes commanding
the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Squadron, 17th Cavalry
in Vietnam in 1967-68, during which he took part in the fierce
fighting in and around Hue in the weeks after Tet ’68.
Becton went on to take over as commander of the 101st’s
3rd Brigade at Cu Chi and Phouc Vinh.
Becton, who in 1972
became only the sixth African-American Army general, went
on to a distinguished post-military career. He was the third
director of FEMA; the president of his alma mater, Prairie
View A&M University; and superintendent
of schools in Washington, D.C. He also served on the American
Battle Monuments Commission when it built the National World
War II Memorial in Washington.
UNPLUGGED
In The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic
History of a Disorderly Decade (Harvard University, 508 pp., $29.95), St. Andrews
(Scotland) University History Prof. Gerard J. DeGroot ranges
far and wide offering his strong, sometimes contrarian, opinions
on virtually every social and political aspect of our generation’s
seminal decade. That includes his treatment of the Vietnam
War.
Of Tet ’68, for example, which hawks and doves
both consider a military defeat but a political victory for
the other side, DeGroot says it “hardly seems a clever
psychological victory.” It was, instead, he claims, “a
colossal blunder [by the NVA and VC] which prolonged the
war, causing unnecessary suffering on both sides.”
In a book crammed to overflowing with facts, DeGroot gets
three small ones dealing with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
wrong.
On the “black marble” of the “Vietnam
Memorial” are “carved the names of 50,000 Americans,” he
says. It’s not the “Vietnam Memorial.” It’s
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, so named because The Wall
honors those who fought in the war, not the war or the country
of Vietnam. The Memorial is made of polished black granite
(not marble), and there are more than 58,000 names on it.
NONFICTION
IN BRIEF
Speaking of the The Wall, MT Publishing in Evansville, Indiana,
has just published The Wall: 25 Years
of Healing and Educating (207 pp., $39.95) in conjunction with the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Fund. For more info, call 888-263-4702.
John Maberry’s
Waiting for Westmoreland (Eagle Peak Press, 243 pp., $16.95,
paper) is more autobiography than memoir, since he offers
up his entire life story, rather than his year in the Vietnam
War with the Army’s 54th
Artillery Group’s 7th Battalion, 9th Artillery, which
operated out of Bear Cat. Writing in a breezy, quote-filled
style, Maberry chronicles his life and times, which included
shaking hands with Gen. Westmoreland following an in-country
church service, turning against the war after he came home,
and finding inner contentment through Buddhism.
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