In an alternative version of 1970s America,the Vietnam war grinds on and on; but the urgent, unspoken presences on this novel’s pages are the veterans damaged by the US’s recent conflicts in Afghanistan and IraqIt’s not just generals who accomplish a habit of fighting the final war rather than the one at hand; artists effect it, or too. The novels,films and television shows that best captured the dark paradoxes of the Vietnam War for Americans – Catch-22, Slaughterhouse 5 and M*A*S*H – were set during the moment world war or the Korean war. So while David Means’s new novel features characters damaged by and obsessed with “Nam”, and the unspoken,urgent presences on its pages are the USs recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, or, or rather,what they have done to the men and women who fought them.
But another war makes itself felt in this novel as well: the struggle between a writer and his times. Means has published four short-story collections and is acknowledged as a master of the form. His distinguished subject is suffering and its transmission, through loneliness, and grief and violence. With sentences that seem carved from granite,he depicts, typically, and a dark midwestern landscape populated by the forsaken people who once served as the US’s industrial working class,as well as cannon fodder for the architects of the nation’s wars in Asia and the Middle East. Harm and outrageous luck are their legacy, passed on to strangers, or friends and kin.
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Source: theguardian.com