Books Briefly
Books Briefly Searching for a Father IN COUNTRY by Bobbie Ann Mason Harper & Row. 245 pp. $15.95 Bobbie Ann Mason won acclaim with her first book, Shiloh and Other Stories. Her first novel, In...
...The story is told mainly through the perceptions of seventeen-year-old Sam (for Samantha...
...Sam and Emmett fill the hours with reruns of M*A*S*H and records of the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen...
...Immobilized, he putters around the house and gives Sam no insight into her father or the war...
...Polemically it reflects a strong antiwar sentiment...
...The territory is western Kentucky, in a stagnant small town where life for young people revolves around Burger King and K Mart...
...We see her begin to grow up as she breaks off a desultory relationship...
...She is obsessed with an unknown father who died in Vietnam before she was born...
...Her first novel, In Country, is less noteworthy but impressive nevertheless...
...Sam also draws a blank from her mother who, now remarried in Paducah, had been married only a month before Sam's father left for Vietnam...
...When her grandparents unearth a diary her father kept in Vietnam, Sam learns something of his war experience...
...The novel culminates with a moving trip to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington...
...She lives in a dilapidated house with her Uncle Emmett, a Vietnam veteran of thirty-five who has noises in his head and acne, probably from Agent Orange...
Vol. 49 • December 1985 • No. 12
