The Things They Carried
By Tim O'Brien
1990
246 pgs.
Published by Broadway
#13 on the NY Times "Best American Works of the Last 25 Years."
O'Brien's work is an unexpected pleasure, a book that has been labeled as sentimental tripe, required reading for idiots and worst of all, wholly conservative literature. Things is anything but; it is a book that embraces the complexity of being a soldier on a level comparable only to Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, and even Trumbo hewed to close to politics by the end. O'Brien has no interest at all in describing leaders, soldiers or war as a guise for political manhandling: this is a book about young men, boys really, and what they do when they have to go to war. As O'Brien himself puts it early on, "Stories about war always sound like a lie, because they are a lie--and that's how you know they really happened. Because they didn't." Every emotion is splayed across these pages, and each one is used so dextrously that by the end, one finds oneself more in love with these boys then could possibly be anticipated when we first meet them. Of course, none of what happened is true--which is how one can be assured that everything described is exactly what O'Brien experienced.
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