Pesoatomico 238

by Tim O'Brien

La vita di William Cowling è segnata, sin da bambino, da paranoia e sogni apocalittici, legati alla proliferazione delle testate nucleari e all’incombere – ipotetico, ma a tratti possibilissimo! – di una guerra che metterebbe fine al genere umano. Impegnato a scavare un improbabile bunker antiatomico per difendere sé stesso e la sua famiglia dalla guerra nucleare, William, ormai cinquantenne, ripensa alla sua vita, dai terrori infantili sino alla diserzione della chiamata per il Vietnam e ai suoi rapporti – impacciati e teneri – con le donne.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels, War, Drama

342 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans.
O'Brien is perhaps best known for his book The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by his wartime experiences. In 2010, The New York Times described it as "a classic of contemporary war fiction." O'Brien wrote the war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), which was awarded the National Book Award.
O'Brien taught creative writing, holding the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University–San Marcos every other academic year from 2003 to 2012.

Reviews

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Sunday, May 5th, 2013, the oceanfront town of Lincoln City, OR set a record temperature of 86 degrees. I know, both because I read about it and because I was there. This heat spike, 32 degrees above average, filled an Oregon coast most often described (and rightfully praised) as brooding or atmospheric with more bouncing bikinis than the whole state typically sees in a year. Beach volleyball was played. Bodies were tanned. For a brief, sundazzled flicker, Oregon put on our best California sundress.

And it made us nervous, and not just because we’re not used to showing so much fog-tossed fishskin so early in the season. Weather has become impossible to enjoy under these circumstances, not just because I picked up one of the worst sunburns of my life (probably due to the sheer impossibility of sunburn on the Oregon coast in early May), but because of the peculiar sense of meteorological menace with which we have been infected. Weather is not weather now - it is the harbinger of something else, each outlier event less a cause for celebration (it’s 80 degrees in May!) as despair (it’s HAPPENING!). I caught myself repeating the same thought over and over within the mechanics of catching and throwing a frisbee again and again - “This is the warmest it has ever been, ever. This the warmest it has ever been, ever.”

Assuming for the moment that the panicking climatologists are not the architects of a grand Democratic feint against freedom or the agents of a Satanic New World Order, it is not at all irrational to view each outlying weather event, especially on the warm side, as another far off gunshot signaling darker things to come, food shortages and killer tornadoes and endless droughts and mass extinctions, all of which are allegedly just far enough over the horizon that my kids will have to deal with it even if I’m lucky enough to check out just prior. The premise may not necessarily compel the conclusion, but the conclusion still hangs around, looking worried and keeping us all up at night. So if it is then also true that this pending tipping point, catastrophic feedback loop or whatever is already on its way or basically inescapable, both because of the lag in meteorological response time and due to our apparent incapacity to take species-wide collective action, it is again entirely rational to wonder how best to respond to the possibility if not likelihood that you will soon be living through the apocalypse.

Of course, how you process this information is up to you.

I see the most obvious option as looking about like this, much simplified:

Most of us will simply ignore the possibility of the Bad Thing About To Happen and continue to live as though the threat is fictional. Thinking about the apocalypse is profoundly self-nullifying unless you are Tom Cruise or Frodo Baggins, in which case it is profoundly self-aggrandizing. For the rest of us, climate change is something to be experienced as a spectator, a victim and, ultimately, a statistic. The heroic narratives of rescue and redemption will occur, but most of us will be excluded. While we are, of course, “all to blame”, this blame is too dilute to prompt any real feeling of guilt or action and besides, AND BESIDES, what you do won’t matter unless everyone else does it too, and they won’t, so you won’t either. Buying a better lightbulb makes you feel better, sure, but it hardly offsets your car and refrigerator, not to mention the millions of cars and refrigerators the Chinese, Brazilians and Indians want and deserve just as much as you do. Easiest best not to think about it.

Of course, you could just build a bunker.

Tim O Brien’s “The Nuclear Age” takes the second approach. Swapping in Vietnam’s specter of nuclear annihilation for climate change, O’Brien’s protagonist William appears in non-chronological snapshots - as a scared child cowering underneath a ping-pong table lined with pencils (the lead will fight off the radiation), as a proto-emo teenager holding a sign reading “THE BOMBS ARE REAL” at the school cafeteria, as a failed adult revolutionary and draft dodger and, most significantly, as a middle aged man digging an underground bunker out from the guts of his suburban lawn while his daughter looks on and his wife starts packing her bags. Of course, like every book by O’Brien, this one is really about Vietnam, but also about the smallness of knowledge and the impossibility of connecting with anyone, the intensely private nature of trauma and the inescapable feeling that nobody really gets it, even and especially the people who were there or who are supposed to be in charge. Sandwiched chronologically between Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, both probably superior, The Nuclear Age mostly ditches the open warfare between the narrator and the reader as to the impossibility of telling a true war story and instead shrugs and tells a story that isn’t true at all. O’Brien has never been good with dialogue and The Nuclear Age is a particularly bad example - every character talks with the same voice, a clipped, overly pithy distance that I’ve always taken as suggesting just how bad we are at even basic self-expression, especially to the people we care about. William uses words to avoid communicating. Bobbi, his wife, communicates only with crappy poetry. There are more adventurous interludes interspersed throughout involving his association with a band of low-level pseudo revolutionaries, all of which seem false, another Cacciato style trick to headfake an action movie plotline to make an emotional or psychological point, and not as well executed.

So why four stars: It’s hard to argue with the guy. If the bombs are real, digging a hole is as valid a response as any. O’Brien considers and rejects the possibility of revolt, acquiescence, complicity. The Nuclear Age is happy to wonder if insanity and well-preparedness might necessarily overlap and allows us to be fully frustrated with our options. We will, he argues, all eventually be caught fatally flat-footed when the typhoon comes, even if we were warned repeatedly of its coming. Better to dig a hole, put your wife in it with you, and go to sleep. Rational paranoia, well-founded crazy. People get dangerous when they’re desperate, and the people who aren’t desperate aren’t being honest with themselves.

This theme goes rancid in The Lake of the Woods, published several years later, and a book so dark that O’Brien’s publishers apparently told him to cool it with the nail-chewing PTSD - afterward he wrote a string of yucky romances and ultimately retired to academia. I won’t spoil the punchline of The Lake of the Woods, but it overextends the possibility introduced here into something close to horror - all of this anxiety can easily spill its banks and drown your friends and neighbors, but one of the great tricks of this narrative is that you never quite get whether this is ultimately a tale of redemption or of double murder. I’m not recommending Lake of the Woods - it’s not quite worth the endless heebie-jeebies - but I feel like it goes all of the way. The Nuclear Age ultimately blinks in the face of its own obsession with annihilation. O’Brien writes one book - just one, that one - without a flicker of a blink. But this one certainly goes down easier.

[Melanie Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyed O'Brien's writing style, which unfortunately is the only thing that kept me going through the plodding backflash sections which took up most of the book. At times the dialogue was a bit unbelievable, a tad too witty and rapid-fire. I found the protagonist's choices about the women in his life confusing and at times his decisions and motivations made him hard to care about.

[Benjamin Rubenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book is about how some people come to develop a fear that never leaves them, and how crippling such a fear can be in terms of the choices they make and how that fear clouds their minds. And it's also about love and the seemingly strange things we'll do to find it and the seeming randomness in how we come to feel love...or not come to feel love.

I read this after reading O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato," which seemed almost entirely a fantasy, and now I'm starting to wonder how much of this is supposed to take place in the narrator's mind, as well. The premise is so strange and so are some of the characters' behaviors. One character, the therapist, may be fabricated (maybe? I'm not sure) and yet he keeps popping up in the book.

Really, though, we are meant to wonder how much of the events actually take place because we have an unreliable narrator who must tell himself throughout the book that he's not crazy. And the book is a little crazy in the sense that the timeline is all over the place, with I bet over half of it taking place as flashbacks. And the author expertly weaves them together, even suggesting life itself is not a linear function regarding time:

I have a theory. As you get older, as the years pile up, time takes on a curious Doppler effect, an alteration in the relative velocity of human events and human consciousness. The frequencies tighten up. The wavelengths shorten--sound and light and history--it’s all compressed. At the age of twelve, when you crouch under a Ping-Pong table, a single hour seems to unwind toward infinity, dense and slow; at twenty-five, or thirty-five or forty, approaching half-life, the divisions of remaining time are fractionally reduced, like Zeno’s arrow, and the world comes rushing at you, and away from you, faster and faster. It confounds computation. You lose your life as you live it, accelerating.

I found this to be a sad book full of sad characters who intend to do sad things. But the ending is kind of hopeful and beautiful.

**spoiler upcoming, turn away now if you haven't read this and wish to**

**CAUTION: spoiler, TURN AWAY NOW...**

This quote below is almost at the very end of the book, not at its climax because the book essentially has no climax. I find it to be a statement not just on the narrator choosing not to commit the awful crime but also a statement on humanity itself, which is full of risks and dangers that could turn people away from wanting to experience humanity at all, but we're human so we try to see past those risks and dangers:

I know the ending. One day it will happen. One day we will see flashes, all of us. One day my daughter will die. One day, I know, my wife will leave me. It will be autumn, perhaps, and the trees will be in color, and she will kiss me in my sleep and tuck a poem in my pocket, and the world will surely end. I know this, but I believe otherwise. Because there is also this day, which will be hot and bright.

So as Covid-19 promises to try and end humanity as we have come to know it here in the U.S. and promises to try and kill 70 million people worldwide, we believe otherwise because there is also this day, and it looks like a damn fine one at the moment.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, there's this guy who from childhood who is terrified of the extreme likelihood of nuclear war. Everyone thinks he nuts. He has an obsessive personality and frankly he is nuts. Over the years, which include many fascinating events, such as going underground to escape the draft, he slips in and out of psychosis. As a child he built a fallout "shelter" under the pingpong table in his parents' basement to the dismay of his parents. Later on he tries to build one in his backyard, to the dismay of his wife and kid. Really, what he's doing is digging a hole for his fears, which can't be escaped.

But what about us, as we go merrily about our lives, as if the bombs aren't coming. "No one knows," he keeps telling us. But of course we do. Doesn't this level of denial approach psychosis? Aren't we all living in a very deep hole?

(BTW, he has several intense sessions w a Milton Ericksonian therapist that are to die for. Erickson had it going on.)

This book is one of many ways O'Brien explores the impact of Viet Nam and different responses to it. While not as wonderfully ambiguous as In the Lake of the Woods, it's a highlight on his way to mastery.

"At night, in my room, I carried on internal dialogues w important world personages....I'd set up meetings with LBJ and Andrei Gromyko and Ho Chi Minh....Just relax, I'd say, and Gromyko would say, 'Man I *can't* relax, these fucking Texans,' so..."

"Mostly, though, I remember Sarah. She made things happen. ...She also had a rare intuitive gift for...push and shove. She brought glitter to bear, and are times a certain ruthlessness.

"Cheerleader to rabble-rouser...In a sense, I realized, cheerleaders *are* terrorists."

[Bill · Rating 1 out of 5]

I dislike this novel as much as much as I liked Mr. O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Unfortunately, I cannot find a single thing to commend this title. I did not find it entertaining or humorous (as the cover copy directed); the protagonist is completely unlikable, and the narrative ends as feebly as it begins.

The story is full of plot holes and as a result much of what happens means little. And none of the characters evolve in any way.

With so many other books available it's a waste of time to read this one.

[Vel Veeter]

There’s still a part of me that wants to close out Tim O’Brien’s catalog. There was once a part of me that REALLY wanted to. Like a lot of people I read The Things They Carried when I was young (about 20) and thought it was amazing. I still do. Then I read If I Die in a Combat Zone and Going After Cacciato and thought they were amazing. I still do. In the Lake of the Woods? It’s really good! Tomcat in Love? Oh no! And it fell off from there. I came down from the high and realized, like most writers, he’s got good and bad. And worst of all, he’s got mediocre. This book is mediocre. It attempts to capture some really interesting big ideas from post-Vietnam America and does to some extent, but at the same time, it falters in even more important ways. We begin with a man about to turn 50 digging a hole in his yard as a way to channel his paranoia about nuclear war and the 1960s into something seemingly productive. It’s 1995 for the record, though the book was written in 1985. This puts strain on his wife and family, and as those ties begins to unravel a little, he tells us about his brushes with radical past in college in the 1960s and beyond.

As the story unfolds, we find out that he was part of a Weather Underground kind of organization, got super close to terrorism and revolution, and then sold out or checked out. It has the issue a lot of books have when they talk about the 1960s in that it’s chock full of “THE SIXTIES” references that bloat what might be interesting ideas otherwise. Worse, it’s just not a very interesting novel.

[Brad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim O'Brien's The Nuclear Age isn't a wholly satisfying read, but it's interesting nonetheless. The narrator has a pathological relationship with nuclear weapons, one which drives him from paranoia to terrorism and back to paranoia. This paranoia becomes so pronounced that he even becomes a major threat to his family. This is rather effective, since, told from his perspective, he keeps reassuring the reader that he actually isn't a threat, though his actions clearly show otherwise.

Now, as wonky as his story is, it helps to think of this is a type of allegory; the narrator's pathology is supposed to represent (I think) a national pathology in relationship to nuclear weapons. Being so culturally (and historically) divorced from the Cold War, some of that wasn't obvious.

One of the early chapters, Civil Defense, is among the best things O'Brien's ever written, and features a psychologist who is either amazing at his job, or incredibly bad at it. The uncertainty is unsettling and humorous.

Odd that nuclear hysteria has died down so much, with the end of the Cold War. One would imagine that an independent nation is less likely to engage in potentially world-ending conflict than, say, a group of ideologues and fundamentalists. And we still have ideologues and fundamentalists. By the bushel.

[Winston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim O’Brien is a polarizing author. The Things They Carried is often cited as the source of his greatest societal disturbance; a fictionalized account of his experiences in Vietnam billed on publication as non-fiction. But also because he’s a hot and cold author, with some books are outstanding and others receiving lukewarm reception.

But personally, TTTC is my single favorite book ever. I’ve read it at least 6 times. I remember being assigned a copy in my high school English class and was so deeply in love that I never gave it back. If you could truly love a book, I loved this book. Chapters left me struggling to breath or painfully heartbroken, or mind blown as words could give to me empathy and emotions I couldn’t describe myself in situations I could never imagine alone. Explosions, lights, sounds, truth; all documented with black ink on white paper.

I swore to never picked up another O’Brien book, just in case the illusion would be shattered. But like a junkie that can’t resist whispered temptations, I see Nuclear Plan in a half- off bin on at the Strand pop up in Times Square. And I’m about to go on vacation. So clearly, I was destined for disaster. Buy me it whispered. Read me! It demanded. You love this author it persuaded.

I caved in.

This book is a solid 3.7 It’s a 4.3 in idea but it’s a 3 low, 2 high in execution. There are some parts that are very moving (That therapist scene is genius), but just overall, for what had such high expectations, it was merely good.

Instead of just picking it apart, I’d like to focus on one of the theses; what is the proper response to a Damocles sword?

In the book, the narrator is plagued by the fear of nuclear annihilation. It begins with his childhood self building a bunker under a ping pong table, lined with pencils [as a lead shield]. It’s almost cute. But in adulthood, the fear manifests itself as an uglier foe, driving him to dig a huge hole in his backyard. Plans for an entire living structure feed his imagination. Back breaking labor gives him nothing more than a deep pit and kidnapping his own wife and child, as he keeps reminiscing and suffering a mental breakdown.

All the while, the hole demands of him; Dig! Dig deeper! That the only sane response is to build a bomb shelter. That the entire rest of the world is filled with idiots, unaware of the impending doom that is housed in missile silos across the country. Fallible, frantic, flawed humans could incinerate everything we know, with flash and a bang. That we’ve teetered at that ending, only dumb luck keeping us from falling into the abyss. Proliferation? Cuban Missile Crisis? Broken Arrows? Terrorists? Unstable world leaders?

O’Brien’s goal, echoing the therapist’s procedure, is to reverse roles, by making the narrator so crazy and self-doubtful that the audience reverses its position, instead supplying the argument for the narrator’s sanity. This sort of culminates in the Committee actually possessing a nuke and storing it in his shed. Sarah casually describing how they could have built their own bomb because plans are near universally accessible but stealing it made a point about proliferation is just so terrifyingly true I want to start digging myself.

This naturally leads to the actual question; is it insane to ignore the looming threat of nuclear war?

Shades of grey, as is everything. I agree with the narrator eventually standing down, valuing his daughter and her future over the impending doom. We still have lives to live, and it cannot be overwhelmed by this threat.

But the threat is real. Nuclear war. It’s diminished from the heights of probability, but this isn’t some ignorable issue. It’s a present danger that is not only catastrophic but potentially species ending. And we should take steps to prevent having it be in our future. We should be aware of the actions that we are individually taking and as a society that will affect the possibility of nuclear war or climate change, and weight them with the proper respect. Some of the leaders are unpredictable to say the least. Tensions between countries like India and Pakistan or Israel and their entire neighborhood aren’t mentioned in America [can we even look away from the Orange?] but pose a real threat to nuclear deterrence as a solution. And then terrorism! That’s something everyone on this hemisphere takes seriously. Though O’Brien, purposefully or not, makes the Committee domestic terrorists; more IRA or the United Freedom Front than FARC or Boko Haram.

I don’t want to come off as some crazy or alarmist junkie. In some respects that is the opposite approach of O’Brien’s character, who goes so far off the deep end, it drives you to meet him halfway. And I see the faults when trying to take a measured tone in discussing an overwhelming idea. It’s hard for brains to grasp ideas of scale. And when the way we’ve evolved to process information doesn’t work, we fail to grasp the entire situation. It’s why Galileo was excommunicated. It’s why it was Robert’s Folly, not his Triumph or his Vision. It’s why we think Elon Musk is a freaking alien.

Or why anyone anywhere would advocate “nuking the shit” out of someone or something.

[BTW That’s never the right answer. But if it is yours: Good News! You’re an uneducated moron*. *With the same flaw any animalistic/logarithm brain would apply to initially analyze that situation.]

I guess in the end I don’t really fault O’Brien for not delivering on a follow up to The Things They Carried in Nuclear Age. My brain isn’t good at formulating opinion when my love for TTTC just out scales objectivity. And I can see why O’Brien himself had difficultly explaining a weapon so devastating it levels all rationality [and literally anything else in its path. Anywhere. From suborbital space. Flying 7m/s.] But he does a pretty decent job at it. And if you’re a fan of that Vonnegut-esque narrator, I would give it a shot.

3.78/5.00 Slight bias in his favor. Great idea, reasonable execution. Entertaining if you’re a fan of the style.

[David McDannald · Rating 2 out of 5]

Salon wrote of Tim O'Brien, that for every masterpiece he'd written there was a corresponding stinker. Unfortunately, The Nuclear Age does not stand up against The Things They Carried, Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods. But there is a magical scene within it. The protagonist, as a young boy, is obsessed with nuclear Armageddon and builds a fall-out shelter in the family basement using a ping-pong table. His father comes down into the basement one night and talks the boy through his fear, and they dismantle the makeshift fall-out shelter in a ceremony that ends with them playing ping-pong.

[Tyler McGaughey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't as strong as O'Brien's other work; sections of it feel like incomplete drafts, like he left them to be developed later but never got around to actuall doing that. The extended flashback, which takes up most of the novel, is potent and draws big emotions from small brushstrokes, which is typical of O'Brien at his best. The present-day framing device, though, didn't engage me and I thought the wife and daughter characters weren't too convincing.

[Melody DeMeritt · Rating 3 out of 5]

fine writing with an odd plot line. Tim O'Brien, thanks much for your service in Vietnam and for your fine novels about that war. Now you are writing about the opposite character who hid underground and could never make up his mind about what he should do next. Even in the end, thank goodness, he still cannot figure out what to do. Fine writing and you are highly skilled, but this novel misses the mark.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not sure what to make of it. Often times throughout the book I found the characters and plot to be a little too unbelievable. But clearly the interplay between what is reality and what is not, is a big theme of the book.

"The Bombs are Real!". Is one crazy for caring about trivial domestic duties while mercurial politicians control massive nuclear arsenals? Or is it sane to force your family into a home-made bunker to protect them from such risks? I think I know how most reasonable people feel, but O'Brien forces us to think a little harder about this choice we face.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this novel of the nuclear age, there is no nuclear wa5r, just great fear of it by the protagonist. GREAT fear. From building a shelter as a young child to apparently digging his own bomb shelter as a married adult, we are constantly involved in his phobia. His protest of nuclear war in college leads to greater protests against the war in Vietnam and even to a brief stint in a radical terrorist organization. There are surprise turns mixed in with predictability before you finish.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim O'Brien explores the inner thoughts of someone confronting the dawn of the nuclear age. Interesting, but not my favorite O'Brien book (possibly my least favorite - I definitely loved The Things They Carried, enjoyed Going After Cacciato, also enjoyed In the Lake Of the Woods). Maybe I've read too many O'Brien novels and don't find them as interesting now.

[Ives Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it. The writing is beautiful, the description fantastic and truly places me into the horrors and life of the protagonist, and it's challenging. But it was hard to follow, jumping from event to event, the thoughts and focus so random. It may have been an attempt to introduce the schizophrenic mind.

[Edward Champion · Rating 2 out of 5]

An aimless and rambling novel about a mentally troubled man building a shelter and looking back. Tim O'Brien's writing style is pretty much the only reason to read this. And even then the lack of real insight in Cowling and the failure to really examine why he ran with the underground (much less his family dynamic) make this a pretty embarrassing volume.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe it's when i read this but the portrayals of the women felt so hard and not great to me. from Sarah to Bobbi and then the girls locked in the room when the main character has his breakdown.

I liked best the descriptions of his family growing up, especially his dad, and all the relationships between physical and emotional feelings. Those were really good, and the existential fear.

[Hannah B · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story about the life of a schizophrenic man. I did not like the ending. It felt like the author didn’t know how to end it. It felt like a cop out. It also has a few loose ends, specifically with his psychiatrist. It was ok.

[Walter Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

a Difficult Read

Similar to the ode of a madman! You need the proper frame of mind to read this or fall into abyss with the protagonist. A book not for the feint of heart, but the brave and assured.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

God damn, this guy can write.

[Hakan Kemal · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a great history of mans insane attempts to achieve something that has buried us all in the past and in the future.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

5 for his ability to bring the reader into a tailspin, 3 for where the story went.

[Susan Bidel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim O'Brien never disappoints. His skills as a writer dazzle and compel, and he tackles the big topics. Definitely worth a read.

[Carol Rizzardi · Rating 3 out of 5]

An early Tim O'Brien, this book still resonates with his themes of war, conscience, and hope.

[Rebecca E Mentzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea; hung in there to finish out of curiosity and the ending was definitely not worth it. Have much respect for Tim O'Brien and other books of his, though.

[Tim Travers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing from a huge Tim O'Brien fan. Didn't hold together, would have been better as a series of short stories.

[Paul Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is about a Guy who spends his life trying to prevent death. But it always comes, and the only way to deal with it is to live, have a little faith and hope (that it won't come).

The story switches back and forth from his childhood/early adulthood, and the present. As a young boy with caring parents growing up in Utah, the protagonist suffers from anxiety about war and death, hiding under the ping pong table at an early age. As a young adult, he dodges the war, and spends several years as part of a fringe, or not so fringe group (think Antifa/BLM), as a money carrier, funding not so peaceful protests. Think bombs.

As an adult, who ironically made money in uranium, he spends his retirement digging a hole to make a bomb shelter in his back yard, estranging both his wife and daughter.

Tim O’brien is a wonderfully diverse writer. While all four of his novels that I have read have significant Vietnam war themes, only The Things They Carried and Finding Cacciato actually center on the war. In the Lake of the Woods was a mystery/thriller, and The Nuclear Age was a somewhat comical, modern novel. I like that he stays above the political fray, and focuses on the emotional toll of the soldiers, of which he was one.

[Eric Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking read, for sure. But then... O'Brien doesn't disappoint.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Sam M.]

good read