Daily Times

July, July

By Tim O’Brien

Penguin Group; Pp 306

“We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare” — William Butler Yeats.

The 60s. The golden generation with huge dreams. A group of college students. The kick ass, never-die attitude. The passionate spring of 1969, when all of them live beyond themselves, truly buoyed and inspired by the times awakening them to new realities. Something is in the air; they live enveloped in a wave of moral heat with a tangible distinction between the good and evil permeating their thoughts and actions. Fast forward to year 2000 — a new millennium — the same group of people meet for a class reunion. This is their story. This is the story of their 30th class reunion in July 2000. This is the story of gigantic events marking their lives in the Julys now in their pasts. This is the story of war, death, marriage, divorce, betrayal, loss, grief, disease, and heartache. This is the story of intelligent, open-minded children of the 60s turning into smug, limited, brittle middle-aged people three decades later.

Tim O’Brien in July, July proves once again that his books, despite being about ordinary people, are anything but ordinary. The National Book Award, Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, Heartland Prize, James Fenimore Cooper Prize O’Brien received for his various books bear testimony to the stature he enjoys as one of the best writers of his generation. He is one of those defining American novelists whose writings describe the world as it is — stripped of lies, layers, and lapses.

The novel touches something deep inside the reader…something forgotten, something deliberately erased. One is forced to introspect just as his ten characters involuntarily, and sometimes by choice, go back in time. As they cringe, cower, wonder, regret, explain, examine, justify, analyse, rationalise, weigh, and ultimately reach some understanding of their lives, the reader takes a moment or two, albeit uneasily, to take a look at his own semi-lived life. The writer, without any pretences, makes one think about things one does not even knew existed within him. He invokes passions, memories, yearnings. In his unique signature style, he unlocks the secrets of the human soul with feeling and intensity, paradoxically employing mostly an unsentimental tone. The clarity and fluidity of his sentences make his writing, about people we recognise and connect with, compulsively readable and unquestionably re-readable.

There are very few writers who write about wars fought by the mighty US and their everlasting aftermath the way O’Brien does. He served in Vietnam and the indelible mark of that gigantic American military faux pas probably helped shape him into the writer he became. There is a constant gentleness yet an incisive insight to his war stories, imbuing them with empathy, profundity of emotion, and even deadpan humour. One of his characters, David Todd, goes through hell on earth in the July of 1969 in Vietnam and the memory of his nightmarish experience lives with him forever. By the river Song Tra Ky, the young soldier witnesses the demolition of his entire platoon; during the process of surviving his own inhumanly painful trial, he loses a piece of his sanity, his soul, never to regain them. Helplessly, incredulously, he sees his body collapse and his inner self slithering away. As he struggles to stay alive, during quiet, perfectly still mornings, through the haunted nights, suffering silently, and sometimes, incoherently screaming, he vows to survive, bravely inhaling the stench of mildew and dead friends. The story of David Todd is stunning to say the least, yet just one of the innumerable ones told by faceless veterans of one of the US’s worst military adventures. Ironically and unfortunately, but persistently, relentlessly, unapologetically, the great nation has managed to produce countless David Todds with their patriotic missions in Afghanistan, Africa, Korea and the Middle East. And the stories go on multiplying as these ghost-like individuals live their entire lives coming to terms with their half-lived lives.

The Class of ‘69 is devoid of true joy and unadulterated hope in 2000. Back then life had brilliant colours, now horrifyingly vulgar shapes and sounds weigh the world down. Their dreams are middle-aged, their politics personal. Once there were no agendas, no subterfuge — just this absolute burning aliveness. The sticky ideals and illusions of ‘69 seem like juvenile ideas to them now. They were not fixed to any moral destiny and there was no drama to it, yet there was a fierce loyalty to their ideals. Now they are all sorting through amendments to the truth, testing the truth, without any sense of moral participation in anything lofty and idealistic. The overweight, whatever-happened-to-us middle-aged folks are bewildered, never expecting the world to break their hearts. The change-the-world dreamers are devoid of spit and vinegar, badly in need of redefinition. They wanted to change the world; sadly the world changed them.

Hiding behind masks, camouflaging inner voids, fighting spiritual dilemmas, presenting the perfect façade to the world, band-aiding deep wounds, oscillating between sanity and madness, sugarcoating bitterness, battling personal demons, and losing bits of selves constantly, the Class of ‘69 seems straight out of a great theatrical production. There are deferred and abandoned dreams, loss of hope, no promises of a better tomorrow, disillusionment, and even outright despair. Some cling on to old ghosts, some have phantom notions of the future, some stay rooted in the mundane present. The old war is over. Now there are new wars, but they all appear to be mere bored spectators. Several million other survivors of their times exist all over, living the same empty lives now. Nonetheless, some of them still want to hold on to the essential renewable fantasy of splendid things to come. But for most of them, forever is simply a scrap of now, a puddle to be splashed through, a moon, a wet sidewalk, a neighbour watering his sunflowers. They wait…for their lives.

By convention, and perhaps out of psychological need, we too often interpret the bizarre facts of our universe as mere farce, beyond belief. Whether we chose to credit the bizarre, to take it seriously, is ultimately irrelevant. The world does its work. On occasion, the extraordinary events of our universe can be explained by the purely conventional, the bizarre by the banal. O’Brien’s novel does all this and more simply and splendidly. His story about a generation’s lost hopes and continuing hopes is for all — the past and the future generations. Once again a story told plainly but poignantly, which makes it a masterpiece to be read by all.

The reviewer can be contacted at mehrt2000@gmail.com