In Country
Pietro, Thomas De
In quest of the bloody truth IN COUNTRY Bobbie Ann Mason Harper & Row, $15.95, 247 pp. Thomas DePietre THE JUST plain folk of Bobbie Ann Mason's fiction first lumbered forth in her widely...
...When she's not glued to the tube or hanging out at the Burger Boy with her knocked-up friend Dawn, Sam somehow finds time to read "dull history books...
...For as one of Emmett's buddies told Sam early on, until she's "humped the boonies" (i.e., survived "some godforsaken wilderness"), she'll never understand what it meant to go "in country...
...Out in the boonies, Sam recalls, "the poem from school about the man who had to wear a dead albatross...
...THOMAS DE pietro is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia...
...For her first novel, In Country, Mason exploits every literary notion and skill at her limited command...
...Much of the novel concerns Sam's dogged pursuit of such artifacts, and Mason includes a number of them in her text: mindless letters from Sam's father to his wife and parents, and the more revealing diary from his time in the jungle — an unexpected find which speaks directly to Sam's obsession...
...No flares or rockets light the sky, no choppers or artillery pierce the quiet...
...And besides, women don't kill...
...Emmett's final maxim ("You can't learn from the past...
...or even M*A*S*H, In Country seems bloated, condescending to its characters, pretentious in its feigned naivete...
...young adult novel, or better yet, an after-school special on TV...
...Instead, that earlier voice, insistent in its sophistication, intrudes on Sam's media-cluttered consciousness...
...FORD teaches law and psychiatry at Harvard University...
...For Sam, at any rate, reality is touch and go, distilled as it is through the sounds and images of popular culture...
...this isn't war at all...
...Robert w. FUNK is professor of religion at the University of Montana...
...Sipping Coke and reading her father's diary on a bench in the Paducah mall, Sam gags on his words ("dead gooks have a special stink'') as it becomes clear he killed his share of Viet Cong without remorse...
...Write Fr...
...Before, the war had always been "like a horror movie...
...Now everything seemed suddenly real...
...under her arm) Sam confirms Emmett's earlier lesson...
...But next to a pop masterpiece like Born in the U.S.A...
...ROBERT OCHS, S.J., is the author of The Death in Every Now...
...Her Uncle Emmett tells his fellow Viet Vets who meet daily at McDonald's: Sam's "got Nam on the brain," and no wonder...
...She thinks: "she will never really know what happened to all these men in war...
...bette s. weidman edited White on Red: Images of the American Indian...
...at the monument, she thinks of "that guy who put pink plastic around those islands...
...Though her narrative insists on its contemporaneity, and assumes a deliberately naive voice, it's organized like "Nancy Culpepper" as an effort in historical retrieval and recreation...
...Commonweal: 622...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...forces us to realize another bloody truth...
...ambassador to El Salvador during the Carter administration, is president of the Center for Development Policy in Washington...
...But for a few nods to their Kentucky locales, these affectless tales could be by Raymond Carver, or Mary Robison, or Tobias Wolff, or Ann Beattie or . . . well, you get the idea...
...But the walking wounded — victims of Agent Orange, Sam insists — tell no tales because "nobody gives a shit...
...12208...
...Maritain Notebooks, Jacques Maritain, 312 pages, $13.89 post, paid, is a new companion to Raissa's Journal, 400 pages, also $13.89...
...they're her cultural correlatives...
...219) 232-8444...
...The historian is a seventeenyear-old girl, Sam Hughes of Hope well, Kentucky, who struggles to understand nothing less than the Vietnam War in all its grim detail...
...Stripped to its essence, it might make a decent REVIEWERS Robert E. white, U.S...
...Albany, N.Y...
...The latter, in particular, relies on an uncharacteristic point of view, that of a graduate-school-educated Kentuckian in exile, a woman no doubt much like Mason herself...
...Vietnam later turned Emmett (with whom she lives) and his cronies (one of whom she beds) into a bunch of zonked-out casualties...
...War, she determines, is American men '' who've got to put on...
...Sam's mother, remarried and living in Lexington, also wants her to forget, "to pretend," in Sam's words, that "the whole Vietnam War never existed," and in a way for Sam it never did...
...MTV provides the novel's soundtrack, and Bruce Springsteen is its most potent icon...
...Snatches of rock lyrics and bits of TV dialogue provide Mason with an emotional shorthand...
...Sam's teenaged father (whom she never met) was killed in the early days of the war...
...If you don't, read any issue of the New Yorker...
...There, she fantasizes the sights and smells of Vietnam, with raccoons as V.C...
...The main thing you learn from history is that you can't learn from history...
...Mason's post-modern hicks typically work at Kroger's, shop at K-Mart, watch lots of TV, and occasionally dream of distant travel (to Florida or Arizona...
...Like the author, she also lives in a small town outside Philadelphia...
...Founded to ransom slaves, our small community of men have grounded our lives and our work of liberation in fraternity, prayer, and the Bible for over 800 years...
...Used Books Permanent Want: Catholic theology/ liturgy books of all kinds...
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...The narrative frame (the first twenty and last ten Classified RATES: 700 a word, one time...
...Walking past the rows of names (with a copy of Born in the U.S.A...
...But she punctuates his long pent-up tale with the only reality she knows: "I saw something like that in a movie on TV...
...pages) simply recounts, in the present tense of course, what everything else in the book leads up to: a trip by Emmett, Sam, and Mamaw (her father's mother) to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C...
...The bulk of this novel merely fleshes out another typically pointless Mason story...
...Her desperate attempt to recreate the Asian Jungle — the novel's first bit of real drama — finds her camping out in Cawood's Pond, "the last place in western Kentucky where a per1 November 1985: 621 son could really face the wild...
...660, three times...
...or call Collect (301) 484-2250...
...Bill Axe, The Trinitarian Friars, P.O...
...It doesn't seem real...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., NYC 10016...
...This diminished fiction, though loaded with surface details, fails to achieve even the modest effect of a story like "Nancy Culpepper...
...Their mundane lives (circumscribed partly by Mason's numbing use of the present tense) remain buried under an accumulation of intentionally extraneous details ("Well, facts is facts") and inarticulate dialogue (" 'I never was any good in English,' he says...
...Shiloh offers some exceptions to be sure: "Detroit Skyline, 1949" and "Nancy Culpepper" among them...
...But they don't' 'say what it was like to be at war over there...
...All I can see in my mind is picture postcards," she worries throughout the novel...
...Like Nancy of "Nancy Culpepper," Sam craves photographs, staring so much at likenesses of her father that "he was beginning to seem real...
...Thomas DePietre THE JUST plain folk of Bobbie Ann Mason's fiction first lumbered forth in her widely praised collection, Shiloh and Other Stories, and there her poor rubes seem to dwell in an interminable present...
...Box 5719, Baltimore, MD 21208...
...Though Mason begins with an admirable goal — to understand the aftershock of that horrible war abroad and those parlous times at home — she ends up trivializing both past and present...
...33 Buckingham Dr...
...Her prose signals real life at every turn, and we're certainly meant to appreciate the passive heroism of those who endure it...
...Religious Community Considering Religious Life...
...and Granny Cakes as K-rations, but soon realizes something's wrong...
...In the story, what the protagonist Nancy (who's named after the kinswoman of the title) hopes to achieve by visiting her dying grandmother back west is what most of Mason's characters never even attempt: to connect with the past, a Commonweal: 620 time before fast food and Phil Donahue...
...the monument itself she considers "something for future archaeologists to puzzle over, clues to a language...
...cowboy boots and stomp around and show somebody a thing or two...
...But not real enough...
...630, six times...
...The books didn't even have pictures...
...I can't believe it was really real...
...When a frantic Emmett finds her the following day, he at last spills his guts, and tells her what "really happened...
...Maurice deG...
...Send lists or call: Erasmus Books, 1027 E. Wayne, South Bend, IN 46617...
...Predictably, Sam's imagined Vietnam resembles a combination of Apocalypse Now (as seen on HBO) and the M*A*S*H reruns she and Emmett watch religiously on TV (even she knows the series isn't really about Korea...
...Classified payable with order...
...The monument, with its ambiguous imagery, is the source of Sam's equally ambiguous epiphany...
Vol. 112 • November 1985 • No. 19
