RFBC #18: America Fantastica
A little talk about Tim O’Brien’s crazy roadtrip—and a link to our podcast.
If you’re of a certain age, you remember the war—er, “police action”—in Vietnam, and how shocking it was that it played out in our living rooms on The Huntley-Brinkley Report. If you’re a man of a certain age, you were drafted—or somehow dodged the draft, or just got lucky and pulled a high draft number. You might have protested the war. You might have gone to Vietnam.
Tim O’Brien was drafted and went to Vietnam and lived to tell the tale. His second novel, 1978’s Going After Cacciato, won the National Book Award in Fiction. His book of semi-autobiographical linked stories, The Things They Carried (1990), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It’s a contemporary classic of war fiction and, in some critics’ estimation, the finest piece of writing about the conflict in Vietnam.
O’Brien’s most recent novel was 2002’s July, July—until late in 2023, when America Fantastica appeared. How could we resist talking about it at the December 2023 meeting of Radio Free Book Club?
We could not. If you can’t resist, either, read on. If you’d rather read the book first, please know there be spoilers ahead. And if you’d rather listen to a handful of careful readers talk about America Fantastica, please give our podcast a try.
Show notes:
The RFBC crew for our December 2023 show was Indianapolis writer Ken Honeywell; writer Jen Bingham; writer/newly minted social worker Robin Beery; and writer/financial advisor/umpire Steve Woods. Our show was recorded at Listen Hear in Indianapolis and produced by the outstanding Oreo Jones for 99.1 WQRT-LP.
We were all familiar with Tim O’Brien, and fans to one extent or another. We’d all read The Things They Carried; three of us had read Going After Cacciato; Ken has also read In the Lake of the Woods and July, July; and Steve declared himself to be something of a superfan who’d read everything. We really wanted to like this book.
In spite of having a huge cast of potentially fun characters, it wasn’t all that much fun. Our hero, accomplished liar Boyd Halvorson (not his real name), has to deal with a corrupt banker, a crooked cop/bank robber, a homicidal ex-boyfriend, an out-of-control billionaire, a 600-pound mother, an amoral factotum/hitman, and a cabal of right-wing media manipulators—just for starters. It all should have been more fun. And for all the manic energy, the pace seemed draggy.
Angie was really annoying. Oh, yeah. Boyd also had to deal with Angie Bing, the bank teller he sort of kidnapped? Or did she kidnap him? Anyhow, we agreed with Boyd on this one. We all just kind of wanted Angie to shut up. It would have improved the pacing.
Was O’Brien saying anything new here? This was probably the biggest criticism more than one of us had with the book. The targets of the satire—billionaires, bankers, hustlers and hucksters, the police, the government, the media, et al.—have been satirized so often in the past decade that the haymakers O’Brien was throwing largely failed to land.
Would we recommend it? Jen was a hard no. Robin “didn’t hate” the book, but would also not recommend it, unless you were intrigued by the idea of Tim O’Brien doing an Elmore Leonard novel. Steve would recommend it only as a very different Tim O’Brien novel, and as a book that’s at least worth thinking about. Ken was deeply disappointed and wouldn’t recommend it.
Bonus recommendations—and nominations for Book of the Year: Jen recommended Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford and thought The Rabbit Hutch was the best book she’d read in a couple of years. Robin recommended The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury and said the book he read that he enjoyed most was Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère. Steve recommended The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks. Ken recommended Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and cited Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood as his favorite novel of the year.
Next month: We kick off 2024 with one of 2023’s most talked-about novels: R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface. It’s a special, nasty little treat for writers. Let us know what you think.
