Why Don't Contemporary American Novels Reflect the Fact That We Are Perpetually at War?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/books/why-dont-contemporary-american-novels-reflect-fact-we-are-perpetually-war?fb_action_ids=719214221424557&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582



I’m a voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just wouldn’t know that -- a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside -- from the novels that are generally published. For at least a decade, Americans have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably little evidence of it.

As for myself -- I’m a novelist -- I find that no matter what I chose to write about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam vets coming home and my second is permeated with a shadowy sense of what the Iraq and Afghan wars have done to us. And yet I’ve never been to, or near, a war, and nothing about it attracts me. So why is it always lurking there? Recently, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about just why that might be and I may finally have a very partial answer, very modestly encapsulated in one rather un-American word: class.

Going to War in the South Bronx

I come from -- to use an old-fashioned phrase -- a working class immigrant family. The middle child of four siblings, not counting the foster children my mother cared for, I grew up in the post-World War II years in the basement of a building in the South Bronx in New York City. In my neighborhood, war -- or at least the military -- was the norm. Young men (boys, really) generally didn’t make it through life without serving in some military capacity. Soldiers and veterans were ubiquitous. Except to us, to me, none of them were “soldiers” or “veterans.” They were just Ernie, Charlie, Danny, Tommy, Jamal, Vito, Frank. In our neck of the urban woods -- multi-ethnic, diverse, low-income -- it was the way things were and you never thought to question that, in just about every apartment on every floor, there was a young man who had been in, would go into, or was at that moment in the military and, given the conflicts of that era, had often been to war as well.

Many of the boys I knew joined the Marines before they could be drafted for some of the same reasons men and women volunteer now. (Remember that there was still a draft army then, not the all-volunteer force of 2013.) However clichéd they may sound today, they reflected a reality I knew well. Then as now, the military held out the promise of a potentially meaningful future instead of the often depressing adult futures that surrounded us as we grew up.

[marmar]

1. k/r

[JustAnotherGen]

2. Escape

I'm a fan of "chick lit" - which started with Bridget Jones and Good In Bed and became a genre separate from bodice rippers. I read to escape - same when I go to the movies. Weisberger tapped into the Devil Wearing Prada - and for me? Reading that book when I did? The fantasy of the heroine of intellect getting sucked in then overcoming and walking away from the shallow and smoke in mirrors made me pump my fist in the air. And who didn't cheer when Nanny got fired by Mr and Mrs X?

I read 3 non fiction books - then escape to a world where the underdog woman overcomes. One can only take so much politics, history, war, destruction, blood shed, economy, etc etc. If I want depth I turn to my dog earred Leon Uris, Fitzgerald, and EL Doctorow paperbacks. I pick up The Color Purple and read it one sitting.

But - if it's a new author that I'm unfamiliar with? It most likely falls I the Chick Lit category where romantic relationships are on the fringes of the main character's daily life and she's trying to make sense of her world, work, and friendships.

[bemildred]

3. Because we don't go to war as a nation any more.

They ended the draft after Vietnam, because it was found that draftees make lousy soldiers in wars of choice, they don't want to die for Enron or whatever, and wars of choice are all we do these days. So now a war is more like a new movie, a product to be sold to the masses, all the ugliness and costs kept behind a screen of bullshit.

[xchrom]

4. it's because of what you wrote -- my own version -- that i became a reluctant convert

to compulsory national service.

[bemildred]

5. That's why I like it: two reasons:

1.) It keeps the public well informed as to military affairs
2.) It forces ignorant politicians to justify their stupid wars

[Orrex]

6. Because we have always been at war with Eurasia.