The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
Paris Stories, by Mavis Gallant

These are two well-done books, linked by their affinity for indirection. Mavis Gallant's stories are collected from the past 50 years of her writing. Tim O'Brien's "work of fiction," published in 1990, is drawn from his experiences in Vietnam, and before and after. His book consists of narratives separately published and collected into a through-line.

In O'Brien's lyrical title story, the indirection comprises identifying the climax of the narrative: we're past it before we recognize it. With this as a starting point, and which serves to introduce his cast of characters, the author spins half a dozen war stories, each of them interesting in its own right. But then O'Brien begins to rework and retell the material. It's as if he were saying that there are many war stories to tell, but the best one is a true story that never happened (something that the ancients would call a myth).

This is especially the case in the masterful pair of stories "Speaking of Courage" and "Notes." In the first of the pair, we read the story of Norman Bowker, of his failure of nerve in the face of adversity, and the death of his buddy as a result of it. Norman painfully ruminates stateside over his breakdown. Then, "Notes" follows O'Brien's course in writing the first story and explains how he added and subtracted facts and fabrications as it was being shaped. Most importantly, in the closing passage, O'Brien claims that while the basic premises of the story are true, Norman Bowker did not break down—this was authorial invention. We are left to answer the question: where is the fact and where the fiction?

Indirection and gradual disclosure are even more important to Mavis Gallant. This collection doesn't provide the date of publication of each story, and internal time cues are scarce. All that is certain is that we are in postwar Europe. A piece like "The Latehomecomer" (about refugees arriving home years after the war is over) shares space with "Forain," which doesn't hint that it happens after the fall of the Berlin Wall until its two-thirds point.

Gallant's dialog tends to be rendered in indirect discourse, and sometimes is garbled, as if we were listening to the indistinct sound track of an independent film. From "Gabriel Baum:"

Notice of his uncle's arrival reached him at a theater seating two hundred persons where he had a part in a play about J. K. Huysmans.... Gabriel had to say, "But Joris Karl has written words of penetrating psychology," and four or five other things.

* * *

Dieter sat slumped in an iron chair belonging to the park administration, staring at his boots. He jerked his head up and looked around, crying, "Why? Where?" and something else Gabriel didn't catch.

We have to pay attention.

Humor is fleeting and sparse. There is this passage from "Scarves, Beads, Sandals:"

Recently, Alain was moved to a new office—a room divided in two, really, but on the same floor as the minister and with part of an eighteenth-century fresco overhead. If Alain looks straight up, perhaps to ease a cramp in his neck, he can take in Apollo—just Apollo's head—watching Daphne turn into a laurel tree. Owing to the perspective of the work, Alain has the entire Daphne—roots, bark, and branches, and her small pink Enlightenment face peering through leaves. (The person next door has inherited Apollo's torso, dressed in Roman armor, with a short white skirt, and his legs and feet.)

Displacement and seeking refuge are the central themes of the collection, and hence another resonance with the O'Brien (though with O'Brien it is the soldiers who are the refugees). Nearly everyone in Gallant is in flight, from the children of an invalid in "The Remission," to those fleeing the sixties, to the writer Grippes in "In Plain Sight," who seems to be fleeing the future.

Both books reward the attention that they demand. Tim O'Brien's is the more plainspoken. To illustrate, consider a simile from the closing piece, "The Lives of the Dead." In the story, the writer "Tim" communes with the spirit of his childhood friend Linda, who died when she was nine years old.

She smiled and said, "Do I look dead?"

..."Well, right now, " she said, "I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading."

"A book?" I said.

"An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading."

posted: 9:34:01 PM