Fiction: Although he does not consider himself essentially a war writer, the Vietnam confilict has been O'Brien's canvas since his acclaimed memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, appeared in 1973. July, July is his seventh novel and, like much of his fiction, that war, though not central, lurks hauntingly in the background, writes Mary Morrissey
'ANYBODY who has lost a great love knows what it is to be on guard late at night in Vietnam, staring into the dark - look at your watch, it's 2 a.m., wait an hour, look again and it's 2.01 - that kind of time-stopped sensation when the world is so dismal and one feels so helpless and hopeless simultaneously. It's a bit like being trapped in the horror of war when time comes at you in little droplets - now, now, now, now - splashing down," Tim O'Brien has said, speaking about the similarities between love and war. Although he does not consider himself essentially a war writer, the Vietnam confilict has been O'Brien's canvas since his acclaimed memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, appeared in 1973.
July, July is his seventh novel and, like much of his fiction, that war, though not central, lurks hauntingly in the background. It is a novel less about the war than its fall-out, as much about those left stranded in its wake, a catalogue of the entire baby-boomer Vietnam generation.
Like his National Book Award-winning novel, Going After Cacciato, the structure of July, July is anecdotal rather than sustained, and that is both its strength and its weakness. It is the year 2000 and a group of students from the class of 1969 is gathered at a college campus in the American mid-west for their 30th reunion (a year late because of an organisational hiccup.) As always, O'Brien's characters are instantly, savagely recognisable.
Former room-mates Amy Robinson ("her old collegiate perkiness replaced by something taut and haggard") and Jan Huebner ("newly bleached hair and plucked eyebrows"), suddenly single after bitter divorces, raise their vodka martinis to the "penisness" of men.
Overweight mop salesman Marv Bertel ("butter in his arteries, abundant flab around his waist") yearns after the class's good-time gal, Spook Spinelli, who has not one but two husbands on the go. There is acid-popping Vietnam vet David Todd, hauling a prosthetic leg around in place of the one he lost in combat, and battling with the voices in his head. And draft dodger Billy McMinn, who fled to Canada eight days after graduation in 1969 rather than serve, jilted at the airport by his college sweetheart, Dorothy Stier, who went "for handsome. Went for conservative. No-risk marriage, so to speak. And then all these years down the pike, yikes, along comes cancer, eight nodes, enough to give a gal the middle-age willies".
Every second chapter takes the reader back to a defining event in these - and several other - characters' lives. Then we are in the present again, as drink-fuelled lusts, old rivalries and new liaisons get played out in the Darton Hall gymnasium. And there's the rub. The schematic structure of July, July creates a kind of narrative telegraph-ese which inhibits depth. Wonderful creations as they are, these characters are brutalised by the crushing timetable O'Brien has set out for them. The 30 years they have to account for makes for a peremptory reductionsim. But then, reunions are like that - whole lives get telescoped, condensed into reports from the front. But in fiction it can feel like being cheated.
Because the characters are so compelling, this reader wanted more about defrocked church minister Paulette Haslo (caught breaking and entering a parishioner's house) or do-gooding Karen Burns, who falls disastrously for a drug-dealer. O'Brien writes piercingly about relationships, particularly the ones that don't work - here he is on David Todd's marriage to fellow student Marla Dempsey: "By early 1978 the calm had become excruciating. They never fought, which was like fighting. Acts of kindness had the bite of briberyThey put x's and o's at the bottom of their grocery lists."
With writing like this, poignant and psychologically acute, less is definitely not more.
As well as being part of a generation robbed of their idealism by a corrupt war, O'Brien's cast is suffering from a bad case of life. More of that life, implied but not articulated here, would have nudged July, July out of the hackneyed class reunion genre into a deeper, darker and ultimately more powerful novel.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and critic
July, July. By Tim O'Brien. Flamingo, 339pp. £17.99