Twenty years had come and gone since Tim O’Brien last released a novel, so when “America Fantastica” was published in October, many of his fans were as surprised as they were pleased. They’d had good reason to believe O’Brien had left his writing career behind.
But in “America Fantastica,” those fans can take one more journey with O’Brien, and it’s a wild trip. In interviews around the book’s publication date, O’Brien, now 77 years old, said this will be his last book. It might be considered a literary encore, and he uses his parting words to take aim at an America in which lies and crudeness are commonplace and shame seems a thing of the past.
The new novel is O’Brien’s eighth. He won a National Book Award for his second, “Going After Cacciato,” published in 1978. But that was hardly his high point. He rose to a rare sort of prominence after the 1990 publication of “The Things They Carried,” a book that felt startling and arresting to readers 30-some years ago and feels that way still to new generations of readers who discover it on their own or are assigned to read it in high school or college.
“The Things They Carried” is perhaps the best known and most admired work of American fiction portraying the Vietnam War, which it depicts from the perspective of the infantrymen. O’Brien knew his subject well. After growing up in Worthington and graduating from Macalester College, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and, in 1969, shipped off to Vietnam.
He left the war in 1970, and 20 years later “The Things They Carried” jolted the literary world. It’s a great book. That’s a plain truth. It’s the sort of book that’s hard to put down and harder to forget. It has made readers out of nonreaders and, in more than a few cases, writers out of nonwriters.
In “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien brought to bear all of his knowledge of the world and all of his writing skill. He put everything together. He pitched a perfect game. And critics and readers embraced the book.
In the years that followed, he surely enjoyed the benefits of having written a commercial and critical success. He was widely admired, and the royalty checks must have provided comforts. But he also suffered a fate reserved for writers who reach the summit. They are not forgiven when their subsequent books fail to achieve greatness.
O’Brien followed “The Things They Carried” with 1994’s “In the Lake of the Woods,” the dark story of a Vietnam veteran and failed candidate for the U.S. Senate who retreats with his wife to the northern woods. One morning she disappears, and the story then provides and explores various theories about the unresolved mystery of her whereabouts.
In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani was dismissive, writing, “Mr. O’Brien’s narrative pyrotechnics never pay off the way they did in ‘The Things They Carried.’ They ultimately feel gratuitous and mannered, much like the self-important comments his narrator likes to indulge in.”
And when O’Brien’s next book, “Tomcat in Love,” was released in 1998, Kakutani opened her review this way: “The hero of Tim O’Brien’s suffocating new novel is not only a boor, he’s also a big bore.”
Beyond the lameness of that sentence, the Times review amounts to a tidy example of what O’Brien was up against. While critics were divided about his later novels, the ones who didn’t like the books seemed determined to take big swings at the author, as if they wanted to see him bruised.
Years have passed, and the era of the scathing review is a memory. Looking back, the books O’Brien wrote after his masterpiece are thought of fondly by many of his readers. They were good books. They were enjoyable reads. They weren’t perfect, but so very few things are.
“America Fantastica” is also imperfect, but it’s a ride worth taking. Considering the fact that it stretches across 450 pages, the story is surprisingly swift. It has something to say about its world, but it doesn’t forget to engage and entertain at every turn.
The story begins with a man called Boyd Holbrook, who was once an ambitious and successful journalist as well as a husband and father. But all of that has been lost by the time we meet Boyd, who has retreated to a small town in northern California and joined a local group devoted to flooding the internet with wave after wave of “untrue truth content.”
Then, having washed out even as a peddler of lies, Boyd decides to rob a bank and depart, but he ends up taking along the bank teller as he flees, beginning a road trip on which Boyd and the teller stay ahead of a growing list of corrupt and damaged pursuers.
It’s a pleasure to read O’Brien again, and regardless of whether this is indeed his last book, readers might as well climb in as he heads toward the sunset.