Novelist O’Brien in 2009 with his two sons,
Tad and Timmy, in a town in France110 Time October 21–28, 2019
TimeOff Books
To disappear from The world as you know
it and escape to something else—Who hasn’t heard
that siren call? It’s long been a theme in the work
of The Things They Carried author Tim O’Brien,
reluctant bard of the Vietnam War and soldier-
poet of the baby boomers. He disappeared himself
a while back, stopped publishing and became a fa-
ther of two boys, finding a fulfilling existence as a
teacher in the quiet Texas suburbs.
Those separate lives now converge in O’Brien’s
Dad’s Maybe Book, his first in 17 years and a stir-
ring blend of memoir, letters to his young sons and
meditations on the humbling nature of parenthood.
Sons meant a new role for O’Brien, one that had
nothing to do with Vietnam or literary stardom. It’s
a work that’s the spiritual inheritor of John Stein-
beck’s Travels With Charley and Kurt Vonnegut’s
A Man Without a Country. Like those, Dad’s Maybe
Book dwells on the state of America and American
life. He takes absolutism to task, finds qualifications
for his own pacifism and considers the paradox of a
moral society that allows for forever war.
At 73, O’Brien is also exploring mortality. He
says it’s likely this will be his final book: “A lot of
my writing here is me trying to look at death as
directly as I can. It makes a good capstone for my
career. A good tombstone too.”
Born into an america “fed by the spoils of
1945 victory,” O’Brien’s life and writing trace the
second half of the American Century. Two early
works published in the ’70s, the Vietnam War
memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the home-
front novel Northern Lights, set the foundation for
his 1978 breakthrough, Going After Cacciato. His
story of an AWOL Army grunt, which incorpo-
rates elements of magical realism, won a National
Book Award.
When the 1980s arrived, America wanted to
forget the recent past. But O’Brien kept writ-
ing about it, societal amnesia be damned. First
came the rollicking 1985 novel The Nuclear Age.
Throughout the decade, he published stories that
melded war with memory, peace with reckoning.
These were collected in The Things They Carried,
O’Brien’s masterwork and a Pulitzer finalist.
If you’ve sat in American-literature classrooms
from 1990 onward, you’ve likely read these stories.
Many readers cite the eponymous “The Things
They Carried” as the one that resonates most.
For soldiers and veterans, in my experience, it’s
PROFILE
Life after
wartime
By Matt Gallagher
“How to Tell a True War Story,” about the difficulty
of talking about our experiences. It’s the one I turn
to—as a vet, writer, human—in a world gone mad.
O’Brien was a conscript. He was drafted into
a war he wanted no part of, and has written over
the years that going to Vietnam as he did may have
been the actual act of cowardice. And O’Brien has
stressed that war is but a subject for him, not a
label or way of life. “The context may sometimes
be war, but the term war writer carries a lot of bag-
gage,” he says. “Was Joseph Conrad only an ocean
writer? Was Toni Morrison only a black writer? Of
course not.”
Yet it’s a steep irony that a reluctant draftee like
O’Brien, so devoted to exposing war’s endless folly,
has inspired so many volunteer soldiers. Despite
this incongruence, he has served as a generous
mentor for many former soldiers, myself included.
Layered and contemplative, Dad’s Maybe Book
immerses itself in the bones of modern American
life, and even includes a comparison of his Viet-
nam experience to that of the British redcoats
at Lexington and Concord. More than anything,
O’Brien hopes the book will serve as an ongoing
expression of love for his sons. “They can turn to it
when they’re 40, 50,” he says, “and I’m long gone
but they want to know more about who their dad
was, and what we were like, together, as a family.”Gallagher’s new novel, Empire City, will be
published in April△
O’Brien’s new
work, Dad’s
Maybe Book, is
the acclaimed
novelist’s
contemplative
look at fatherhood,
his literary life,
and lessons to his
young sons about
America and war