Tim O'Brien's The Nuclear Age isn't a wholly satisfying read, but it's interesting nonetheless. The narrator has a pathological relationship with nuclear weapons, one which drives him from paranoia to terrorism and back to paranoia. This paranoia becomes so pronounced that he even becomes a major threat to his family. This is rather effective, since, told from his perspective, he keeps reassuring the reader that he actually isn't a threat, though his actions clearly show otherwise.

Now, as wonky as his story is, it helps to think of this is a type of allegory; the narrator's pathology is supposed to represent (I think) a national pathology in relationship to nuclear weapons. Being so culturally (and historically) divorced from the Cold War, some of that wasn't obvious.

One of the early chapters, Civil Defense, is among the best things O'Brien's ever written, and features a psychologist who is either amazing at his job, or incredibly bad at it. The uncertainty is unsettling and humorous.

Odd that nuclear hysteria has died down so much, with the end of the Cold War. One would imagine that an independent nation is less likely to engage in potentially world-ending conflict than, say, a group of ideologues and fundamentalists. And we still have ideologues and fundamentalists. By the bushel.

Most engaging book about a guy digging a hole that you will ever read.

In a departure from Tim O'Brien's other works, The Nuclear Age follows the path and experience of an individual who chose to avoid going to Vietnam and ultimately participated in guerilla training for a resistance movement. It is as moving as O'Brien's other books and well worth seeking out to read.

This is about a Guy who spends his life trying to prevent death. But it always comes, and the only way to deal with it is to live, have a little faith and hope (that it won't come).

The story switches back and forth from his childhood/early adulthood, and the present. As a young boy with caring parents growing up in Utah, the protagonist suffers from anxiety about war and death, hiding under the ping pong table at an early age. As a young adult, he dodges the war, and spends several years as part of a fringe, or not so fringe group (think Antifa/BLM), as a money carrier, funding not so peaceful protests. Think bombs.

As an adult, who ironically made money in uranium, he spends his retirement digging a hole to make a bomb shelter in his back yard, estranging both his wife and daughter.

Tim O’brien is a wonderfully diverse writer. While all four of his novels that I have read have significant Vietnam war themes, only The Things They Carried and Finding Cacciato actually center on the war. In the Lake of the Woods was a mystery/thriller, and The Nuclear Age was a somewhat comical, modern novel. I like that he stays above the political fray, and focuses on the emotional toll of the soldiers, of which he was one.

Sorry this O'Brien fan can only give two stars. A one-note tune about H-bomb hysteria. Implausible characters. It didn't even sound like O'Brien. More like Irving, my not-so-favorite Irving.

3.5 stars

Don't Think About It

After reading two other Tim O'Brien books I thought I would read this one next. Within the first few pages I feared that I was making a mistake and I was right. This book is very dull and repetitive.

On Sunday, May 5th, 2013, the oceanfront town of Lincoln City, OR set a record temperature of 86 degrees. I know, both because I read about it and because I was there. This heat spike, 32 degrees above average, filled an Oregon coast most often described (and rightfully praised) as brooding or atmospheric with more bouncing bikinis than the whole state typically sees in a year. Beach volleyball was played. Bodies were tanned. For a brief, sundazzled flicker, Oregon put on our best California sundress.

And it made us nervous, and not just because we’re not used to showing so much fog-tossed fishskin so early in the season. Weather has become impossible to enjoy under these circumstances, not just because I picked up one of the worst sunburns of my life (probably due to the sheer impossibility of sunburn on the Oregon coast in early May), but because of the peculiar sense of meteorological menace with which we have been infected. Weather is not weather now - it is the harbinger of something else, each outlier event less a cause for celebration (it’s 80 degrees in May!) as despair (it’s HAPPENING!). I caught myself repeating the same thought over and over within the mechanics of catching and throwing a frisbee again and again - “This is the warmest it has ever been, ever. This the warmest it has ever been, ever.”

Assuming for the moment that the panicking climatologists are not the architects of a grand Democratic feint against freedom or the agents of a Satanic New World Order, it is not at all irrational to view each outlying weather event, especially on the warm side, as another far off gunshot signaling darker things to come, food shortages and killer tornadoes and endless droughts and mass extinctions, all of which are allegedly just far enough over the horizon that my kids will have to deal with it even if I’m lucky enough to check out just prior. The premise may not necessarily compel the conclusion, but the conclusion still hangs around, looking worried and keeping us all up at night. So if it is then also true that this pending tipping point, catastrophic feedback loop or whatever is already on its way or basically inescapable, both because of the lag in meteorological response time and due to our apparent incapacity to take species-wide collective action, it is again entirely rational to wonder how best to respond to the possibility if not likelihood that you will soon be living through the apocalypse.

Of course, how you process this information is up to you.

I see the most obvious option as looking about like this, much simplified:

Most of us will simply ignore the possibility of the Bad Thing About To Happen and continue to live as though the threat is fictional. Thinking about the apocalypse is profoundly self-nullifying unless you are Tom Cruise or Frodo Baggins, in which case it is profoundly self-aggrandizing. For the rest of us, climate change is something to be experienced as a spectator, a victim and, ultimately, a statistic. The heroic narratives of rescue and redemption will occur, but most of us will be excluded. While we are, of course, “all to blame”, this blame is too dilute to prompt any real feeling of guilt or action and besides, AND BESIDES, what you do won’t matter unless everyone else does it too, and they won’t, so you won’t either. Buying a better lightbulb makes you feel better, sure, but it hardly offsets your car and refrigerator, not to mention the millions of cars and refrigerators the Chinese, Brazilians and Indians want and deserve just as much as you do. Easiest best not to think about it.

Of course, you could just build a bunker.

Tim O Brien’s “The Nuclear Age” takes the second approach. Swapping in Vietnam’s specter of nuclear annihilation for climate change, O’Brien’s protagonist William appears in non-chronological snapshots - as a scared child cowering underneath a ping-pong table lined with pencils (the lead will fight off the radiation), as a proto-emo teenager holding a sign reading “THE BOMBS ARE REAL” at the school cafeteria, as a failed adult revolutionary and draft dodger and, most significantly, as a middle aged man digging an underground bunker out from the guts of his suburban lawn while his daughter looks on and his wife starts packing her bags. Of course, like every book by O’Brien, this one is really about Vietnam, but also about the smallness of knowledge and the impossibility of connecting with anyone, the intensely private nature of trauma and the inescapable feeling that nobody really gets it, even and especially the people who were there or who are supposed to be in charge. Sandwiched chronologically between Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, both probably superior, The Nuclear Age mostly ditches the open warfare between the narrator and the reader as to the impossibility of telling a true war story and instead shrugs and tells a story that isn’t true at all. O’Brien has never been good with dialogue and The Nuclear Age is a particularly bad example - every character talks with the same voice, a clipped, overly pithy distance that I’ve always taken as suggesting just how bad we are at even basic self-expression, especially to the people we care about. William uses words to avoid communicating. Bobbi, his wife, communicates only with crappy poetry. There are more adventurous interludes interspersed throughout involving his association with a band of low-level pseudo revolutionaries, all of which seem false, another Cacciato style trick to headfake an action movie plotline to make an emotional or psychological point, and not as well executed.

So why four stars: It’s hard to argue with the guy. If the bombs are real, digging a hole is as valid a response as any. O’Brien considers and rejects the possibility of revolt, acquiescence, complicity. The Nuclear Age is happy to wonder if insanity and well-preparedness might necessarily overlap and allows us to be fully frustrated with our options. We will, he argues, all eventually be caught fatally flat-footed when the typhoon comes, even if we were warned repeatedly of its coming. Better to dig a hole, put your wife in it with you, and go to sleep. Rational paranoia, well-founded crazy. People get dangerous when they’re desperate, and the people who aren’t desperate aren’t being honest with themselves.

This theme goes rancid in The Lake of the Woods, published several years later, and a book so dark that O’Brien’s publishers apparently told him to cool it with the nail-chewing PTSD - afterward he wrote a string of yucky romances and ultimately retired to academia. I won’t spoil the punchline of The Lake of the Woods, but it overextends the possibility introduced here into something close to horror - all of this anxiety can easily spill its banks and drown your friends and neighbors, but one of the great tricks of this narrative is that you never quite get whether this is ultimately a tale of redemption or of double murder. I’m not recommending Lake of the Woods - it’s not quite worth the endless heebie-jeebies - but I feel like it goes all of the way. The Nuclear Age ultimately blinks in the face of its own obsession with annihilation. O’Brien writes one book - just one, that one - without a flicker of a blink. But this one certainly goes down easier.

With a blend of humor and seriousness, O’Brien shows how the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe becomes so real to his main character, William Cowling, that it drives him to extreme paranoia. He begins digging a hole in his backyard to use as a shelter against what he believes is the inevitable day of doom. Although Cowling may depict the hypertension of someone losing his mind, his fears confront the ignorance and negligence of our age’s refusal to acknowledge the potential threat of nuclear disaster. O’Brien may have written what amounts to a comedic novel, but the underlying message takes a direct aim at the crucial need to maintain constant vigilance, although not action that devolves into fanaticism. The book ultimately searches for a civility and calm among the dark forces of humanity that can have the world lined up for destruction with the detonation of a single bomb.

An aimless and rambling novel about a mentally troubled man building a shelter and looking back. Tim O'Brien's writing style is pretty much the only reason to read this. And even then the lack of real insight in Cowling and the failure to really examine why he ran with the underground (much less his family dynamic) make this a pretty embarrassing volume.

I am not sure what to make of it. Often times throughout the book I found the characters and plot to be a little too unbelievable. But clearly the interplay between what is reality and what is not, is a big theme of the book.

"The Bombs are Real!". Is one crazy for caring about trivial domestic duties while mercurial politicians control massive nuclear arsenals? Or is it sane to force your family into a home-made bunker to protect them from such risks? I think I know how most reasonable people feel, but O'Brien forces us to think a little harder about this choice we face.

So, there's this guy who from childhood who is terrified of the extreme likelihood of nuclear war. Everyone thinks he nuts. He has an obsessive personality and frankly he is nuts. Over the years, which include many fascinating events, such as going underground to escape the draft, he slips in and out of psychosis. As a child he built a fallout "shelter" under the pingpong table in his parents' basement to the dismay of his parents. Later on he tries to build one in his backyard, to the dismay of his wife and kid. Really, what he's doing is digging a hole for his fears, which can't be escaped.

But what about us, as we go merrily about our lives, as if the bombs aren't coming. "No one knows," he keeps telling us. But of course we do. Doesn't this level of denial approach psychosis? Aren't we all living in a very deep hole?

(BTW, he has several intense sessions w a Milton Ericksonian therapist that are to die for. Erickson had it going on.)

This book is one of many ways O'Brien explores the impact of Viet Nam and different responses to it. While not as wonderfully ambiguous as In the Lake of the Woods, it's a highlight on his way to mastery.

"At night, in my room, I carried on internal dialogues w important world personages....I'd set up meetings with LBJ and Andrei Gromyko and Ho Chi Minh....Just relax, I'd say, and Gromyko would say, 'Man I *can't* relax, these fucking Texans,' so..."

"Mostly, though, I remember Sarah. She made things happen. ...She also had a rare intuitive gift for...push and shove. She brought glitter to bear, and are times a certain ruthlessness.

"Cheerleader to rabble-rouser...In a sense, I realized, cheerleaders *are* terrorists."