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Oct. 7th, 2005 03:51 pmI'm supposed to be writing about The Things They Carried today, but it's proving rather difficult, mainly because I can't seem to decide how I feel about it. It felt to me like a very angry book, and in several places it seemed like O'Brien was being openly contemptuous of his readers, suggesting that we don't or won't get it, we can't get it, not unless we were there, in Vietnam, experiencing the kinds of things that he experienced, and everyone who wasn't there had better just shut up and quit pretending to understand. This attitude made it an uncomfortable reading experience for me, but that doesn't mean it was a bad book. In fact, it may even be a sign of what a good book it is, but it still didn't make me enjoy the book much.
As I said in an earlier post, O'Brien's anger and resentment toward civilians reminded me strongly of Billy Prior's anger and resentment. I found myself thinking a lot about Regeneration while reading The Things They Carried. The two books couldn't be more different, yet they both convey a real, visceral sense of the horror and uselessness of war. The terrible things that Tim O'Brien and Norman Bowker and Rat Kiley endured in a rice paddy in Vietnam are not the same as the terrible things that Prior and Owens and Hallett endured in a trench in France, but there is the same sense of futility, the same grinding boredom, the same awareness of the randomness and uselessness of death. It's quite obvious that O'Brien has not managed to shake off his memories of the war, and reading this book made it clear to me why that's true of so many veterans.
I have to say that I didn't care for the postmodern sort of fooling around that O'Brien engages in. Inserting himself as a character in his stories, musing aloud about the nature of storytelling, presenting something as the truth only to turn around and tell us that, no, it wasn't true, and does it even matter whether it's true or not? There are times when I enjoy this sort of thing, but for some reason I found it ineffective here. I can't really figure out why that is. Is it that O'Brien handles his narrative intrusions less skillfully than other authors, or is it that his subject matter somehow seems less suited to this sort of fancy playing about? For whatever reason, the stories I liked best were the ones that were the most straightforward: the title story, the one in which O'Brien contemplates fleeing to Canada before being drafted, and the tiny little one about the time the company set up camp in a nearly-abandoned pagoda.
Since finishing The Things They Carried, I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. I timed things rather poorly, and now I've got to hurry in order to have this one read in time for my next book club meeting. This is the sort of thing that makes me question the idea of being in the book club in the first place. I like being able to read what I want to read when I want to read it, and I don't like feeling rushed the way I do now... But the book club is about meeting people as much as it's about books, so I'll grin and bear it at least until I've had a chance to properly get to know these people.
As I said in an earlier post, O'Brien's anger and resentment toward civilians reminded me strongly of Billy Prior's anger and resentment. I found myself thinking a lot about Regeneration while reading The Things They Carried. The two books couldn't be more different, yet they both convey a real, visceral sense of the horror and uselessness of war. The terrible things that Tim O'Brien and Norman Bowker and Rat Kiley endured in a rice paddy in Vietnam are not the same as the terrible things that Prior and Owens and Hallett endured in a trench in France, but there is the same sense of futility, the same grinding boredom, the same awareness of the randomness and uselessness of death. It's quite obvious that O'Brien has not managed to shake off his memories of the war, and reading this book made it clear to me why that's true of so many veterans.
I have to say that I didn't care for the postmodern sort of fooling around that O'Brien engages in. Inserting himself as a character in his stories, musing aloud about the nature of storytelling, presenting something as the truth only to turn around and tell us that, no, it wasn't true, and does it even matter whether it's true or not? There are times when I enjoy this sort of thing, but for some reason I found it ineffective here. I can't really figure out why that is. Is it that O'Brien handles his narrative intrusions less skillfully than other authors, or is it that his subject matter somehow seems less suited to this sort of fancy playing about? For whatever reason, the stories I liked best were the ones that were the most straightforward: the title story, the one in which O'Brien contemplates fleeing to Canada before being drafted, and the tiny little one about the time the company set up camp in a nearly-abandoned pagoda.
Since finishing The Things They Carried, I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. I timed things rather poorly, and now I've got to hurry in order to have this one read in time for my next book club meeting. This is the sort of thing that makes me question the idea of being in the book club in the first place. I like being able to read what I want to read when I want to read it, and I don't like feeling rushed the way I do now... But the book club is about meeting people as much as it's about books, so I'll grin and bear it at least until I've had a chance to properly get to know these people.
