The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 13 April 2015
by Tim O'Brien
It is a steamy summer's night in July 2000, and the Class of '69 is having its 30 year reunion celebration (31, actually, due to the struggles of one of the characters). Tim O'Brien unites ten classmates from a Minnesota college, baby boomers who have grown into their early fifties, grown out of their youthful idealism, grown through relationships and loss. The perspective of the story flips back and forth from July 2000, to July of 1969, with the upcoming Moon landing ringing in the air, or to July of another year, to tell the individual tales that brought each character to the place they find themselves at the turn of the new millennium. The first story, that of an amputee soldier who watched his whole platoon die on the shores of a Vietnamese river, is perhaps the most difficult to get through, and this grim tale sets a portentous tone for the remainder of the book. There is a slightly magical quality to his visions of his own future. A voice speaks to him as from above, meditating on life and fate. The reader gets the idea that some of these characters have a sense of where all this is leading. And yet, there is a lot of humor in the book as we recognize ourselves in the flawed characters, their choices and their broken or abandoned dreams. Another man flees to Canada to dodge the draft. A woman supplements her street theater career with sketchy private photo sessions. One man struggles with the need for attention, crafting elaborate lies. One woman faces breast cancer. Another faces her own inability to experience love and empathy. These folks have complex interlocking relationships, loves and losses, marriages and divorces. The individual stories are small, but poignant. The tone of the college reunion hits the right notes of disappointment and fragments of hope. A great book, capturing the mood of life and the toll it takes on us all as time passes.
Also by Tim O'Brien: [Going after Cacciato]