The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Further evidence that a truly great book will wait for me; it won’t become dated or tired. Minnesotan author O’Brien’s linked story collection about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, was as good as readers had assured me. It was sometimes so funny that I laughed aloud, at one point so terribly sad I had to set it down. The stories and characters are so engaging that it took a while for me to realize and admire the skill with which the stories are crafted. The combination of O’Brien’s writing, structure, and story makes for a powerful soldier’s-eye view of the Vietnam war.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
Throughout, O’Brien subverts the desire of a reader to know what is “really” true. The stories are identified as fictions, but they don’t read as them, unless viewed through the lens of O’Brien’s above caution.
May 31st, 2008 at 6:50 pm
I agree, this is a great book and I love the construction of his title essay.
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I need to read this one!
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:51 pm
The issue of truth & TTTC is central to the reading experience of the book, I think. College freshmen particularly often have troubles with the book because of it, convinced it’s the “truth.” Just reading the passage you quoted both transported me to the world he created and makes me want to read it again.
June 7th, 2008 at 9:44 am
My Jewish history prof in grad school always emphasized the reader’s desire for the “really real” and how terrible truths, like of the Holocaust and Vietnam, are sometimes better told in fiction or metaphor, because truth is too immediate, and often less believable.