What Did Tim O'Brien Ever Do to You?
The always insightful David Gates has reviewed Tim O'Brien's July, July, and I wouldn't want to be O'Brien this morning:
In some unpretending airport novel, such a slapdash come-on might slide by. Serious fiction, though, ought to have more respect for both its audience and itself. Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried did. But July, July shows up for its date with posterity wearing loafers without socks, with its shirttail hanging out. And it doesn't improve on acquaintance.
Probably only a Tolstoy... could have done much with the crashingly trite premise of July, July: the 30th-anniversary reunion of the college class of 1969, the heart of the heart of the baby boom generation and the last bailouts from the tailspinning 60's. (The reunion doesn't happen until the conveniently millennial summer of 2000 because somebody screwed up. How lucky can a novelist get?)
But this is only a novel, not reality. So O'Brien gives us capital-C Characters. A still-traumatized Vietnam veteran. (Here, you play novelist: Do you make him an amputee? A druggie? Have him hear a voice in his head?) An uptight Republican housewife. (Do you give her breast cancer? A husband who's ''a senior vice president''? Put her on a 30-years-too-late acid trip?) A draft dodger who split for Canada. (Did the Republican woman jilt him all those years ago?) If you correctly answered yes to each of those questions, you can imagine the other major characters for yourself -- as long as you don't go hog-wild for diversity. O'Brien puts only white heterosexuals in a novel his publisher says "speaks directly to our unique American character." I hate to sound P.C., but when writers start that America-talk, it does raise the expectation that they've looked around the place.
These days, even the television shows his characters surely watch collude in a culture of knowingness and irony far beyond the ken of July, July. Cardboard stars just don't cut it anymore. Really, they never did.
I love David's writing, the clarity and rightness of it, the ability to cut through pretension and hypocrisy. His was the first sensible review of American Beauty that I read.
11:09:25 AM 
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