The Books: “The Things They Carried’ (Tim O’Brien)

tttcto.jpgDaily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien.

Fiction? Journalism? Reportage? Memoir? Do we really care? I don’t. But lots of people seem to reallllllly care about those labels. As we have seen time and time again in the last couple of years with the big-fat-lie “memoir” trend. Here’s my view, which has changed over time.

So James Frey made some shit up. Okay. It was fiction and we thought it was a memoir. (Not to brag or anything, but I called the James Frey thing. I CALLED IT. Way before it came out that the book was made up, I felt his phoniness – just from interviews. Didn’t believe a word the guy said.) But here, for me, is the question: Was it a good book? Did it move you? Does it make it LESSER because it was made up? Knowing it was made up means it’s less good? I did not read the book, full disclosure, although I did read the first chapter and thought it was a piece of shit, and not worth my time. The addiction memoirs hold very little interest for me and I wasn’t impressed with Frey’s writing at all.

Fiction can be “truer” than reality – I happen to think that Anne of Green Gables or Ulysses or Cat’s Eye or Blood Meridian or A Streetcar Named Desire is SUPERIOR to most non-fiction – FAR superior, and also more true. Give me INVENTION, give me IMAGINATION … make some shit UP. Go for it.

Tim O’Brien was in Vietnam, obviously – and the same guys are featured in most of the stories in The Things They Carried, they’re all part of a whole. He calls it a “work of fiction” and much of it reads like fiction – but he also made no bones about it that it’s based on truth. He put his own life into words. That’s what a writer does.

The Things They Carried feels almost like a diary, a sometimes hallucinatory diary, of being in a platoon in Vietnam. Sleep-deprived, hyper-realistic, surreal dreamlike imagery … It has some of the horrible poetry of Dispatches, another classic of Vietnam literature.

The stories stand up on their own in multiple genres. No wonder the book struck such a huge chord with people, then and now. It crosses genres, it can’t be easily classified. People hooked into it who never read a book like that in their lives. His writing is accessible but also gutsy, fearless, and poetic. People who don’t like short stories could get into it because they feel like mini-essays or articles. People who don’t like non-fiction could totally lose themselves in the stories told here.

The title story is “The Things They Carried”. There’s no “plot”. I hesitate to even say more about it because if you haven’t read it, you really should do yourself a favor and pick it up. The power of it is in experiencing it the first time. O’Brien pulls his vision in to a microscopic level and then pulls it back into a telescope – this is the motion of the entire story, going back and forth – minutia, universal truths … The platoon troops through the jungle. What are “the things they carried?” Some of it is gear – and O’Brien goes into that in great detail. But of course some of it is NOT gear. Letters from home. Photos of sweethearts. Talismans. And then there are things that have no weight at all. Memories. Hopes. Daydreams.

“The Things They Carried” is a powerful and important piece of American literature.

And it makes the question “But is it true??” that is so in vogue today with similar works seem small and petty. Is Anna Karenina not “true”?

I read a review of The Things They Carried that referred to it as a “testament” – and I think that’s pretty damn accurate.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien.

They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a week, when the resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in green mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a two-gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide. Dave Jensen carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank. Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself – Vietnam, the place, the soil – a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters – the resources were stunning – sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter – it was the great American war chest – the fruits of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat – they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders – and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

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16 Responses to The Books: “The Things They Carried’ (Tim O’Brien)

  1. Brendan says:

    I love the James Frey call. Kudos. What a moron. Even if every word in that book were true he’d still be a self-aggrandizing insecure jackass.

    It’s like having a conversation with a fratboy who won’t stop describing how wasted he used to get and how much trouble he got in for it. It’s boring.

    So instead of saying, ‘This is my boring history of intoxication and jackassery’, he has to say, ‘My strength of will allowed me to move past such childish jackassery…but wasn’t I cool while I was jackassing around?’

    What a jackass.

  2. Gene S. says:

    Memoir writers have an advantage in that readers will accept shoddy writing, absurd coincidence, and poor character development—almost anything, in fact—IF they believe that what they are reading is the absolute Truth (as in ‘it really happened’)…Fiction places more strictures on a writer, and therefore is harder to pull off…so it’s no wonder a losy writer like Frey (and others) would want their book labled as ‘Non-Fiction’…

  3. Emily says:

    I don’t want to take things off topic from the book you’re posting about, but I hadn’t read your Frey post before (or at least I don’t remember reading it). That was awesome. You nailed him.

  4. red says:

    Gene –

    It’s an interesting conversation.

    I am thinking out loud here: when I sit down to write an essay about a situation in my life – as I do on this blog often – I am inventing much of it. Not the facts, but … I am creating it so it can not just live in the memory banks but come out to play … I re-create conversations, I make no bones of the fact that these are from memory … and I choose to play up one thing over another … I create myself as a persona (depending on the essay), and I am totally conscious of doing this. So if one looks for absolute accuracy (that is my main beef with the overly literal literary trend these days) you won’t find it and you might accuse me of making shit up.

    But I see it as creating a narrative for our lives (to quote Joan Didion) … and that’s one of the things writers do. We are NOT literal. There is a place for that kind of literal writing – but we are NOT literal. It’s like the people of Limerick and even some of Frank McCourt’s brothers scoffing his book and saying, “It wasn’t like that at all.”

    They are well within their rights to say that – but it’s HIS book, HIS narrative … he has created himself as a persona, and we see it all thru his eyes … It’s a memoir, sure, but is it the truth? Would we feel DUPED if we realized he had either embellished or exaggerated? Well. I know I wouldn’t but that goes to my deeper point: If it’s well-written, I can forgive anything. And I suppose that’s one of the things that separates me from the Mongol hordes: If something strikes me as a piece of shit, even if it is on an important topic, even if it is supposedly true – it is still a piece of shit.

    James Frey got messed up in the boundary-world of that – and then of course had big-wig supporters – so the lie had to continue, and he profited from it. I actually don’t think that’s so terrible a thing. I really don’t.

    What interests me is the folks who felt DUPED and were PISSED. Like you said: If it seems to be “real”, then people are more willing to go ga-ga. The voyeuristic impulse, whatever.

    I still think that there is more truth and more “reality” in something like Middlemarch than any memoir, any day of the week.

  5. Brendan says:

    If he’d not seemed so pleased with himself it wouldn’t have seemed so egregious. It was as if he needed it to be true.

  6. red says:

    Emily – When he got “busted” for his big fat lie, I felt a weird sense of triumph because I knew he was a phony from when the book was published!!

    I still think all of the “I feel so DUPED” people were kind of missing the boat … If you enjoyed the book, or if it touched you, or moved you … then just call it fiction and move on.

    If I found out that Joan Didion had made up her husband’s death that she writes about in The Year of Magical Thinking – if that was an excuse for her to ruminate on death and widowhood – but her husband was, in fact, alive … is that tricky? Sure it is. It does add to the power of the book, knowing that she is writing the whole thing in the first disorienting flame of grief … It FEELS real.

    I don’t know … it’s just an interesting thing to think about.

    Tim O’Brien is writing about the Vietnam War. He does it episodically – the stories aren’t connected – but then they add up to a whole. Based on guys he knew? Of course! He openly called the book autobiographical – and yet it’s listed under Fiction.

    I think there’s room for that kind of blurry label in books!

  7. red says:

    Bren – I remember having a couple great conversations about Frey with Mike when I was out in LA in 2005 – the Frey thing had busted open at around that time, I think … so everyone was talking about it. His take on it was really interesting – we all sat around arguing about it, it was great!

  8. Emily says:

    Yeah, after reading The Heroin Diaries and The Dirt, I heard about more than a few people calling bullshit on some of the stories, but you know what? I don’t care. Both books were moving and entertaining to read. Most of it’s real enough, and there are rap sheets, photographs and a body count to prove it. It doesn’t have to be entirely true – and not just in the realistic sense of different people recalling events from altering perspectives. It just has to feel genuine to the reader. At least to me.

    I thought a lot about that, with all the faked “memoirs” that have been published over the last few years — why people need to feel like they’re reading something that “happened,” when they enjoy fiction just the same. You called it, though. There’s a phoniness to it all. Like Guy Ritchie faking a cockney accent to feel like he’s a tough, inner-city London punk, when he really grew up on some posh country estate in England. Give me a break. By all means, be a rebel, write about rebels, be a freak and make stupid mistakes, just don’t congratulate yourself for being cool.

    That reminds me – did you ever pick up a copy of Go Ask Alice?

  9. red says:

    Emily – those are awesome examples! It is kind of a tricky area – but it’s a memoir, it’s meant to be subjective.

    And then there’s something almost totally unclassifiable like Nick Tosches’ haunting biography of Dean Martin … never read anything like it. It’s a biography, sure – but it’s more like a rumination on … personality, being Italian, whatever, art, mortality, death … Nick Tosches is an amazing writer – but anyone looking for a by-the-book biography of Dean Martin would be really frustrated by his book. (Their loss, in my opinion!!)

  10. Gene S. says:

    Mixing fact and fiction is nothing new…Henry Miller did it to great effect in Tropic of Cancer, but that book was clearly labeled as a Novel…which is to say Fiction…even though it probably contained more of the literal truth than Frey’s opus…Also, someone like Tom Wolfe uses fictional techniques in his non-fiction books, but he doesn’t *invent* anything (he saves that for his novels). So, I think it’s possible to be effective in a literary sense, and still stick to the Truth.

    I really think it’s just a matter of truth in advertising. Readers bring a different set of expectations to a non-fiction book than they do to a novel. Eroding the line between truth and fabrication can’t be very good for society.

    BTW: I read The Things They Carried some years ago, excellent book, and I’m pretty sure it was in the Fiction section when I bought it.

    Just found this blog by accident…great posts…

  11. red says:

    Gene – I am aware that it is nothing new. I’m a voracious reader of all kinds of genres. The fact that I have an opinion on the matter does not mean that I am not aware of the long tradition in mixing fact and fiction. Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, all those guys … writing novels, masquerading as truth, masquerading as confessional, what have you.

    And yes – Things They Carried is labeled as fiction – not just from where it is shelved but also in the “this is a work of fiction” language in the front.

    In Cold Blood is one of my favorite books of all time – and just in terms of its style, it reads like a novel … but it obviously isn’t. However – that book is put on the Fiction shelves as well!

  12. Gene S. says:

    I may be wrong about this but I seem to remember reading somewhere that Capote *wanted* In Cold Blood classified as fiction. That is, he wanted it to be considered as work of literature, rather than reportage. But I don’t think it was a novel masquerading as truth, he stuck to the facts as far as I know.

  13. red says:

    I said it read like a novel – I didn’t say anything about him not sticking to the facts – my point was that the prose feels like fiction, while it is most certainly NOT fiction – that was his whole experiment. In Cold Blood has the novelist’s attention to sensory detail, and the character elements … setting up scenes, etc. – but it’s NOT a novel. That’s what was and is so startling about it.

    And yes. He called In Cold Blood a “non-fiction novel”.

    Capote wrote:

    It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the “nonfiction novel,” as I thought of it. Several admirable reporters–Rebecca West for one, and Joseph Mitchell and Lillian Ross–have shown the possibilities of narrative reportage; and Miss Ross, in her brilliant “Picture,” achieved at least a nonfiction novella. Still, on the whole, journalism is the most underestimated, the least explored of literary mediums.

    He did make some funny crack too about Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song – and how he was glad to have “given Mailer the idea” for such a novel – something bitchy and competitive like that.

    I like that he included Rebecca West in his list. She’s one of my faves. Her book Black Lamb Grey Falcon is a travelogue but in many parts of it it reads like a novel. It’s hypnotic.

  14. Emily says:

    Didn’t Mailer take a stab at him over In Cold Blood too? Something about Mailer having a problem with the narrative style of it?

  15. red says:

    Yes! I love their rivalry – like two gorillas pounding their chests at each other.

  16. The Books: “The Things They Carried’ (Tim O’Brien)

    Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves: The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. Fiction? Journalism? Reportage? Memoir? Do we really care? I know I don’t. But lots of people seem to reallllllly care about those labels. As we have…

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