Book Review - The Things They Carried

My expectations for this book were way too high.  At my local bookstore, favorites of the employees are marked with a special bookmark filled with signatures of all who loved the book.  This had at least ten signatures on it.  In addition, a trusted friend on Goodreads hinted that it was one of her favorite books, reminding her of a book we had both read and loved, City of Thieves.   With that kind of fanfare, it's no wonder all I could say after I finished reading, "Well, that was disappointing."

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is part fiction, part non-fiction, part personal memoir and part Intro to Writing about the Vietnam War.  O'Brien served in Vietnam and claims the story as his as well as those he served with but by the book's end, I wasn't sure how much of the story was true and how much he thought would make an interesting book.  He spends the first chapter outlining his characters, detailing what gear the soldiers were required to carry as well as the few individual tokens each chose to bring along and for what reasons and I suppose by leading with a chapter like that, I expected to form a connection of sorts with these men.  Most are reintroduced during various later chapters, but I was never sure who was who or what happened when to which soldier, mostly due to the author being unclear about what was the truth. For instance, in once chapter, a character is home after the war, driving around a lake in his truck wishing he could tell someone, his father, his old girlfriend, a stranger at a restaurant, about how he didn't earn the Silver Star because he couldn't save his friend from drowning in a sinkhole of sewage because it smelled too bad only to be told in another chapter that none of it actually happened.  He hadn't actually let his friend die.  Or he hadn't actually almost earned the Silver Star.  Or that particular character wasn't actually a real person.  The truth comes from that it could have and probably did happen.  To someone.  At some time.  Somewhere.   O'Brien uses an entire chapter to boast about this method of writing and what he considers the most honest way to tell the truth about what happens during a war where there is no such thing as truth.   He explains that much of what he writes actually happened but is probably not true and the stuff that he makes up probably happened.  Wait.  So you're telling me....what the...?

While the quirky mixture of fiction and memoir and how-to-be-a-writer is probably what makes it such a darling of reading circles, I found the combination of short stories, modern day confessions and chapters to explain why he included the chapters preceding them all tinged with a certain self-importance.  Almost as if he believes he is the first author to have figured out that war is hell and morally ambiguous.   It's his version of the truth.  Even if he had to make some of it up.

I get that the war probably traumatized him for life.  I don't see how becoming friends with people, only to see them blown to bits or drowned in a sludge of sewage could be anything but traumatizing.  Furthermore, I see how this book might be considered intelligent, even artsy.  The writing is unusual for a war story in that its circular and poetic, tangled up without any sense of chronology.  But, for a book about a group of men who served together in Vietnam and what they carried and why, I should care more about these men and what happened to them.  The writing, however pretty, shouldn't get in the way of that.   The unpredictable and incongruent format O'Brien uses prevented me from forming any real intimacies with any of the characters, real or not.

Unfortunately, I think that's exactly what the author was hoping to do with this book. I think he wanted me to care about these individuals and their varied backgrounds, the reasons they served and the manner in which some died.  More importantly, he seemed to want me to understand that war isn't really about valiance or honor by sharing stories about heroes who were neither valiant nor honorable.  On a certain level, both of those things happened.  I saw the gritty reality, the heartbreak and the inhumanity.  But, I believe I needed to really know these men and not just their caricatures as O'Brien painted them, for that to happen and so I'm left disappointed and wondering if I missed some different and greater purpose of the book that other readers noticed.