![]() If you attended high school in the United States at any time since the mid-’90s, you were probably assigned O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), a cerebral collection of Vietnam War stories that probes the nature of truth in wartime. For the next thirty years that’s what he did, serving up big-thinking and morally uncompromising stories that were challenging, disruptive, occasionally a little didactic, but never mealymouthed, never shy.įor a while, at least, it seemed history might reward his ambition. Somehow, I imagined, I would strike back with sentences, make the monsters squirm in shame.” Transformed by his experience of war, the young O’Brien meant to deliver a kind of bare-knuckled moral education to the nation that sent him there. “Back in 19, when Vietnam collided with my life,” he writes, “I yearned for revenge against the cheerleaders and celebrators of war. He admits as much in Dad’s Maybe Book, a book-length retrospective essay released in 2019. As all the promotional materials make sure to mention, it is O’Brien’s first novel in over twenty years.Īs a young writer, O’Brien had envisioned for himself a grand, even utopian, literary agenda. ![]() America Fantastica therefore marks a return to form. ![]() He seemed to abandon his vocation as a novelist at precisely the moment my generation’s war began. He maintained this posture for the remainder of the century, with a string of widely read and critically acclaimed books that nearly all professed his abiding shame at having participated, even involuntarily, in something as unforgivable as an American war.īut then, right around the turn of the century, he stopped writing fiction. Sent off to war by his hometown draft board in 1969, the young O’Brien solidified his literary celebrity within the decade, establishing himself in short order as the most influential Vietnam War writer in the United States. Review of America Fantastica by Tim O’Brien (Harper Collins, 2023)Īmerica Fantastica is Tim O’Brien’s only novel to take place in a post-9/11 world.
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