By Alex Vernon
547 pages
St. Martin’s Press, 2025
Reviewed By Dave Newsom
Of the handful of great themes that make up the nearly 3,000-year history of Western culture and Western literature, one of the most lasting of those themes is war. We see it all the way back to the beginning, with Homer’s Greek oral epics The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Today, however, there is perhaps no finer chronicler of war than contemporary American author, Tim O’Brien. A veteran of the Vietnam War, O’Brien has fashioned a body of highly lauded work. Beginning with his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) and continuing through such award-winning titles as Going After Cacciato (1978), The Things They Carried (1990), In the Lake of the Woods (1994), and July, July (2002), O’Brien is, for many, today’s premier example of a great writer writing about the great theme of war.
Born in 1946, at the close of World War II, O’Brien came of age in the small Midwestern town of Worthington, Minnesota, during a time of relative national peace and national stability. America was reveling in its post-war prosperity and its post-war image of itself as the world’s hero, rescuing civilization from the clutches of imminent and unexplainable evil.
In many ways, it was a good time to be a young boy growing up in America. But while the Rockwellian stereotype of a small-town, Midwestern sensibility would be crucial to the eventual formation of O’Brien’s sense of “self,” it also carried with it a darker side. Appearances could be deceiving. At home, his father’s alcoholism was all-consuming, causing O’Brien and his siblings, as well as O’Brien’s mother, to spend days and nights uncertain of the reality of their lives, all the while struggling to maintain an outward appearance of “normal” to their friends and neighbors of Worthington, MN.
Looming in the background of O’Brien’s life in Worthington, then, was the constant shadow of half-truths, and deception, and lies, and fictions created to cover the lies, and the fear of being “found out” by those living their own shadow-lives across the street.
This small-town pressure to live up to your neighbors’ expectations, as well as the pressure to mask ugly truths with a self-contained fiction, would become fundamental to the burgeoning writer’s understanding of his craft and of the purpose of creating stories, and of creating art, and of the need to weave a fiction to get at life’s real truths.
In what is largely considered his greatest novel, 1990’s The Things They Carried, O’Brien expresses his foundational credo this way. In that book’s chapter, “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien’s fictional narrator—a Vietnam veteran (like himself) –contemplates the tricky nature of telling true stories about war to those who were not there to experience it, not there to feel and to know the actual truth of what happened, and why:
“You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask,” O’Brien writes. “Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, ‘Is it true?’ and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer…. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
In his new biography, published earlier this year, Peace is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien, Alex Vernon gets to the heart of this complex and conflicted American author. It is a project year in the making for Vernon—a project he seems perfectly suited for, in many ways. A child of America’s Midwest, himself, growing up in Kansas City (Prairie Village, Kansas), Vernon is also a veteran, having served as a tank commander in the first Persian Gulf War, during the early 1990s.
These two sensibilities—his understanding of what it means to grow up a child of the Midwest, as well as his understanding of what it means to fight on foreign soil and to experience the truth of war first-hand—Vernon “gets” O’Brien. Vernon understands his subject. And throughout his book, he demonstrates a thorough understanding of the assignment:
“In his 1950s small-town childhood,” Vernon writes early in the book, “O’Brien fantasized about becoming a writer but never spoke of his ambition because it seemed so remote a possibility. In high school and college, he steered toward graduate school, journalism, and politics.” But then would come America’s tragic involvement in the Vietnam War, an event that “’collided’ with [O’Brien’s] life and ‘made’ him a writer,” Vernon explains.
And while his biography covers O’Brien’s life and his writing career, to date, “at its heart,” Vernon continues, “is one writer’s apparently unlikely beginnings on his way to being regarded as one of the best writers of his generation…. At its heart of hearts is the war.”
In fact, had events played out differently for Tim O’Brien, he might have graduated from college at a slightly different time, instead of in 1968. Had events played out differently, his life might have taken a completely different path, and he might very well have been able to evade the tragedy of the war in the jungles of Vietnam.
As Vernon wisely comments: “That’s not O’Brien’s story only, that’s the country’s story too.”
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