Tim O’Brien, July, July

Tim O’Brien is best known for his writing about Vietnam. His most widely read book is The Things They Carried, a collection of interconnected stories stunning in its emotional power and narrative sophistication. 

These fictions unforgettably evoke war in all its complexities and contradictions—its obscenity, its savage beauty, the strange aliveness felt in the stinking midst of death. At the same time, O’Brien explores our human urge to tell stories, especially war stories, a way perhaps, with courage and imagination, to salvage something from the wreckage. 

O’Brien’s new book, July, July, is also comprised of the interconnected stories of a small group of characters: not Alpha Company this time but the 1969 class of Darton Hall, a small Minnesota liberal arts college much like O’Brien’s alma mater, Macalester College in St. Paul. The narrative moves back and forth between the 30th reunion (held a year late, in July 2000) and crucial moments in the lives of eleven friends. 

A reunion is a perfect opportunity to measure aspiration against actuality, to compare the self one imagined with what one has become. Under cardboard stars, in the school gym, to the music of Buffalo Springfield, the conversation hums: “Death, marriage, children, divorce, betrayal, loss, grief, disease.”

Now it’s not just the vets: Everyone is wounded. David Todd, a promising baseball player, lost a leg in Vietnam; he returns with a drug habit and nightmares of a sweltering July afternoon in 1969 on the Song Tra Ky river.

In July, 1967, David’s classmate Billy McMann went to Canada instead, but he’s not whole either. His girlfriend stood him up at the airport (“I’m a Republican, Billy, I’m an American. I can’t help it.”), and Billy’s entire life is poisoned by his resentment for her betrayal. 

Dorothy, having settled down in Highland Park with her well-to-do husband, two beautiful sons, and twin Volvos, now has cancer. 

And despite the late-night drunken singing of her classmates, Dorothy never believed that all you need is love: “You need a first-rate oncologist, a dexterous surgeon, a medicine cabinet stocked with some very powerful chemicals. You need tamoxifen. You need Xanax and Paxil and a fake breast and luck and guts…”

But July, July is not nearly so glum and depressing as such a summary might suggest. It’s full of a kind of tipsy, shameless, late-night comedy. There are revelations, surprises, unlikely comings-together. David, the amputee, and Dorothy, the cancer survivor, find each other, and share a blotter of LSD. Before long, they’re comparing prostheses.

“’Nam and putrid breast cancer,’ Dorothy was saying, ‘who would have thought it?’

‘Same difference,’ said David.”

The book crackles with verbal energy, a good deal of it supplied by Johnny Ever, a voice David Todd, wounded and wrapped in a morphine haze, first hears in Vietnam on a dead comrade’s transistor radio. He’s a cosmic DJ, an angel, a trash-talking Greek chorus. 

“Thing is,” he tells David, “nobody dials out Johnny Ever. I’m like—how do I say this?—I’m network. I’m global. I’m Walter Cronkite gone planetary.”

The Darton Hall class of ’69 are survivors, all of them, crippled by self-pity and bitterness some of them, disillusioned, full of regret, but resilient still, still capable of imagining. They do what survivors do when they come together. They tell stories; for what it’s worth, they shape the moments that define their lives into something durable. Their stories are by turns funny and sad, tragic and stupid, embarrassing and admirable.

“It’s what we decide that sticks,” one character says. “When we say yes, when we say no. Those over-the-cliff choices we made.”

—The Buffalo News