Fobbit

Feb 03, 2013 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars

My goodness I am LOVING this laugh out loud 21st century cousin to MASH or Catch-22. 2/3 through and not ready to be done. A FOBBIT is a soldier with a non-combat job in the Iraq war Forward Operating Base. Harrowing and amazing. Cool structure where episodes are recast from a variety of points of view. Run don't walk. Had to wait 2 months on the library list and so glad I did.

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Dec 14, 2012 Jessica Keener rated it 5 of 5 stars

This brilliant, powerfully rendered debut seizes you by the collar; spits, shouts, whispers and laughs in your ear, drags you through the sweat, pus, blood and grit of war in Iraq, 2005, and ultimately pulls every string in your heart to reveal at its core, as only a true classic war story can, the insanity of humans desperately battling the inanity of mayhem and violence. Explosive and ironic, sandstorms kicking up from the pages will land in your teeth. This novel was written in surround sound...more

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May 11, 2013 Brendan Brohan rated it 4 of 5 stars

One of Mr Abrams main characters, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr., describes what it is to be a Fobbit: seeing the war through a telescope from an air-conditioned cubicle. Fobbits are in the war, but are not of the war. These are the denizens of the Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) who spend their entire deployment in the relative safety of the FOB. The book could be described as MASH meets Catch 22 in Iraq. It uncovers humor in the tedium and bureaucracy of media releases that have to be review...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have finished reading the novel FOBBIT (ISBN 978-0802120328, trade paperback, $15.00) by first time novelist David Abrams. A “fobbit” is defined as a “U.S. Army employee stationed at a Forward Operating Base especially in Iraq”. The story is loosely built around the author’s experiences in the military including a tour of duty in Iraq. I guarantee that you won’t be left emotionless as you read this book. Humor. Anger. Frustration.

FOBBIT does for the military in Iraq what CATCH 22, SLAUGHTERHO...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Mathew rated it 2 of 5 stars

Definitely disappointed with Fobbit. Mildly amusing and insightful Iraq observations for the first two chapters, but then it just begins to tell the same thing over and over. There's no central inciting incident or storyline to drive the pages. Worst, the characters are all treated with an equal and baffling mild authorial disdain or contempt. I get the fact that 'Fobbits' are the lowest of the low with their timidness and desk jobs (I understood this after it was TOLD to me in the very first li...more

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Dec 03, 2012 Eric rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

The book was well-written, but I feel queasy about designating this book as among the books I read because I only read up to the first 80 pages or so, and then, for the rest of the novel which had a total of ~400 pages, I just scanned, skimmed,… reading those in like one hour; so I cannot really say I really read this novel.

Upon passing the 50-page mark, I decided that this novel has little or no relevance to me, at least at this point in my life, so I opted to just not read the rest cover to c...more

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Nov 10, 2012 John Luiz rated it 5 of 5 stars

Making war and death the subject of satire and humor is a monumentally difficult task, and only a few, like Joseph Heller, can pull it off. David Abrams achieves that difficult task here, and Fobbitt fully warrants its accolades as the Catch 22 of the Iraq war. It's an eye-opening view of the lives of soldiers operating in Forward Operating Base in the middle of Baghdad. Public Affairs Office Chance Gooding serves as the moral center of the book, and he is fully aware of the futility of what he...more Making war and death the subject of satire and humor is a monumentally difficult task, and only a few, like Joseph Heller, can pull it off. David Abrams achieves that difficult task here, and Fobbitt fully warrants its accolades as the Catch 22 of the Iraq war. It's an eye-opening view of the lives of soldiers operating in Forward Operating Base in the middle of Baghdad. Public Affairs Office Chance Gooding serves as the moral center of the book, and he is fully aware of the futility of what he does - filing press releases that distort the harsh realities of the war to keep a positive spin on the effort for the folks at home, while the press ignores the military's propaganda because they're way ahead of them in uncovering the real facts of every incident. Gooding is surrounded by incompetents - his boss, who rewrites him mercifully, can't stop his nose from bleeding in every moment of crisis, and who blotches his clothes with continent-shaped food stains from his constant over eating. But perhaps the poor soldier you feel most sympathy for the hapless Captain Abe Shrinkle, who does everything wrong - from peeing himself when a local national, and suspected suicide bomber, gets his car stuck under a tank; to tossing a hand grenade into an American military fuel truck he doesn't want to have be captured by insurgents, and in so doing fries a another local who had crawled under the truck. His general consigns the inept captain to work the towel service at the F.O.B.'s ridiculously ill-equipped gym. I won't give any more away about Shrinkle's fate because it's a key part of the books culmination. The characters, the plotting, and the humor in this book are pitch perfect. I enjoyed every page and was sorry to see it end. It's one of a number of great books about Iraqi soldiers that came out this year, along with the terrific Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Kevin Powers' Yellow Birds. Abrams' book reads like an instant classic. Abrams is a veteran and every page is fully of anecdotes and insights that only someone's who lived through this would know. (Care packages are a source of rich satire in the novel, as Shrinkle is a hoarder of them, but the book still inspired me to send one!) (less)

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Nov 08, 2012 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars

Growing up in cold war Germany where all the military personnel I knew worked primarily in hq offices this book reads like non fiction to me. It is well written & depicts the reality of a hq beautifully. Obviously I can't relate to the feelings of threat of being in a war, however terrorist activity was a reality as places I shopped, housing units friends lived in, & other sites around town were routinely (not frequently) bombed. Since my sponsor (that is military lingo for breadwinner o...more

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Oct 20, 2012 Bob Mustin rated it 4 of 5 stars

What a difference a few decades makes, but I’ll come to that in a bit. David Abrams’ book, Fobbit, is perhaps the most comprehensive look yet, through the lens of fiction, at the U.S. involvement in Iraq. Its cover blurbs want us to compare it to Heller’s Catch-22 and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. For my money, the comparisons are apt, but with some significant differences. First, a bit about the book.
Fobbits are the so-called public affairs personnel of the U.S. Army, the Pentagon’s spin doct...more What a difference a few decades makes, but I’ll come to that in a bit. David Abrams’ book, Fobbit, is perhaps the most comprehensive look yet, through the lens of fiction, at the U.S. involvement in Iraq. Its cover blurbs want us to compare it to Heller’s Catch-22 and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. For my money, the comparisons are apt, but with some significant differences. First, a bit about the book.
Fobbits are the so-called public affairs personnel of the U.S. Army, the Pentagon’s spin doctors, who attempt daily to put a freshly-scrubbed face on the U.S.’s occupation of Iraq, on the mounting deaths of soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and insurgent/terrorists. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, the various warring sects of that country, not least among them the Sunni and Shi’a religious factions, are at one another’s throats - as they’ve been for centuries - and the U.S. and its allies are caught in their crossfire, constantly being subjected to IEDs (hidden explosives) and other maiming and killing situations. Of course, the soldiers on the firing line hold the Fobbits in high disdain for their inherent lack of risk.

Abrams, who served as a Fobbit in 2005, gives us an often blurred cast of characters, some Fobbits, some on-the-line soldiers, and some commanding officers who are trying to make strategic sense of the stacked deck they’re playing from. Some characters rise and fall quickly. Others, such as Fobbits Eustace Harkleroad and Chance Gooding and soldiers Abe Shrinkle and Vic Duret, reveal the schizophrenic nature of the war. Eventually, Gooding serves as the war’s chronicler, a counterpoint to Harkleroad’s spin doctoring - even to the extreme of Harkleroad spinning e-mails to his mom. And Shrinkle, a hyper-patriotic officer, who proves too inept to hold down such a role, proves the book’s eventual catalyst.

The author does an excellent job of characterizing the war, both in his narrative and his characterizations, all in excellently wrought prose. Perhaps he tried to do too much here, but that temptation is always great when such a war is seen from a perspective still too close to the author’s war experience. And that brings me back to my opening paragraph here, and the distance of a few decades.

None among his characters is a parallel to Catch-22’s Yossarian or Slaughterhouse Five’s Billy Pilgrim. These earlier novels’ primary characters were openly sensitive to the violence, chaos, and insanity of war, sometimes reacting in passive aggressive fashion a la M*A*S*H’s Corporal Klinger, sometimes as desperately moral anarchists, such as that movie/TV show’s Hawkeye Pierce.
In Abrams’ war, there are no draftees, only volunteers, and one senses (quickly) that the public at home is paying little attention to this overlong conflict. No one openly challenges the war’s ethics, nor the Fobbits’ spin. It's a story of playing it as safe as one can in such dangerous conditions, militarily, morally, and emotionally. As close as they come to moral outrage is sneering at these overweight, air-condition-protected “knights of the keyboard.” And only two, Shrinkle and Gooding, eventually display resistance and moral qualms. But by then it’s too late for their metamorphoses to matter much in this book.

Still, Abrams does pitch the war in powerful terms, terms the U.S. and its European allies may not reconcile for many years to come.
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Oct 15, 2012 Tony rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: loanable, novels

This debut is a fantastic fictional glimpse into the bizarre reality of modern warfare that is deeply grounded in the author's twenty years in the U.S. Army. Drawing from diaries he kept while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the book centers around Sgt. Gooding, who drafts battalion press releases for the Public Affairs Office at Forward Operating Base Triumph in Baghdad. Gooding is one of the titular fobbits: "Like the shy, hairy-footed hobbits of Tolkien's world, they were reluctant to ven...more This debut is a fantastic fictional glimpse into the bizarre reality of modern warfare that is deeply grounded in the author's twenty years in the U.S. Army. Drawing from diaries he kept while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the book centers around Sgt. Gooding, who drafts battalion press releases for the Public Affairs Office at Forward Operating Base Triumph in Baghdad. Gooding is one of the titular fobbits: "Like the shy, hairy-footed hobbits of Tolkien's world, they were reluctant to venture beyond their shire, bristling with rolls of concertina wire at the borders of the FOB. After all, there were goblins in turbans out there! Or so they convinced themselves. Supply clerks, motor pool mechanics, cooks, mail sorters, lawyers, trombone players, logisticians: Fobbits, one and all. They didn't give a [darn] about appearances. They were all about making it out Iraq in one piece."

Through Gooding's eyes, we see the inanities of the modern Army and how the frustrations of white collar work (server crashes, anyone?) now extend to military service. Gooding's portions of the book are colored by more than a few shades of workplace satire, in the vein of Office Space. Meanwhile, life beyond the FOB's walls, the life of the "door-kickers" is given to us via chapters focusing on the indecisive and ineffectual Captain Shrinkle, whose missteps keep falling to his commander, Lt. Col. Duret to clean up. Shrinkle and Duret narrate their own chapters and kind of represent the two ends of the spectrum of how we might want our soldiers to act as they represent the country. Shrinkle entered the military for the wrong reasons, rose in rank for the wrong reasons, and is a combination of poor judgement, self-centered righteousness, and outright ineptitude. Duret, on the other hand, is a solid career officer who has more or less mastered the art of projecting a calm and cool demeanor, even as he suffers crippling migraines and longs for the arms of his wife. In other words, Shrinkle is the kind of officer who endangers his men without even realizing it, while Duret is the kind of officer every mother would want for their son.

The voices of Gooding, Shrinkle, and Duret make up 90% of the book, with a few brief interludes featuring Gooding's superior, the pathetic, backseat editor, nosebleeding PAO commander, and Sgt. Lumley, who is one of Shrinkle's men. Through these five voices, the reader is sucked into the insular world of Operation Iraqi Freedom, with its acronyms, jargon, and boredom leavened with terror. The conversations, emails, diaries, etc. all combine to paint a very vivid portrait of a modern military monoculture. The book will inevitably be compared to predecessors like Catch-22 or films like M*A*S*H, but it stands firmly on its own as a great document of a time and place. Some readers might wish for a little more plot to move things along, but the book's main aim is to describe the inanities of daily life at the FOB. A masterpiece of military fiction that's about as different in tone and style as one could imagine from the last great war novel I read: Matterhorn.

Note: It's a shame that this book is burdened with such an awful cover, one that tells the reader absolutely nothing of what to expect inside. Terrible design.(less)

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Sep 15, 2012 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Fobbit ’fä-b t, noun. Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–2011). Pejorative.

Abrams has created a novel using his own Iraq war experiences about a group of military journalists and clerks who are serving on the FOB and the infantry who are in the battlefield. By alternating chapters, Abrams shows us the dirty, dangerous, gut-wrenching conditions in which the infantry serve and juxta...more

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Jul 21, 2012 John Sundman rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read an uncorrected advanced review copy; please bear in mind that some of the small problems I saw may have been fixed in the final revision.

First, the positives. The book paints a convincing picture of the claustrophobic world of the Forward Operating Base during the early years of the American occupation of Baghdad -- around 2005. The novel describes daily life of the Army bureaucrats who live and work there ("fobbits"), with some of the residents getting a more sympathetic rendering than o...more I read an uncorrected advanced review copy; please bear in mind that some of the small problems I saw may have been fixed in the final revision.

First, the positives. The book paints a convincing picture of the claustrophobic world of the Forward Operating Base during the early years of the American occupation of Baghdad -- around 2005. The novel describes daily life of the Army bureaucrats who live and work there ("fobbits"), with some of the residents getting a more sympathetic rendering than others. Along with the Fobbits, sharing the same mess hall, etc, are the "door-kickers", real soldiers who go out on patrol every day, and sometimes return with fewer than started. We see some of their experiences "outside the wall" as well.

The central characters of the novel work in the Public Affairs office writing press releases, the most important of which, of course, report news of American soldiers killed in action. The press releases go through various levels of editing up the chain of command, starting out as bland but somewhat informative accounts of how soldiers died, and ending up as mealy-mouthed double-talk that only mention the soldier's death in passing. By the time these virtually useless dispatches have been approved and released, The New York times has already reported the story in depth, and CNN has shown footage of where it happened. Nobody is going to read the stupid press release; nobody cares. Yet the P.A. fobbits have to crank them out; that's their assigned role in the war effort. You have only to imagine Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut telling a similar tale to get the general feel for what Abrams is attempting.

In one minor recurring piece, there is a tiny, smelly under-equipped gym where some fobbits and some door-kickers go to work out. Abrams makes you feel how this run-down, depressing "Recreation Facility" is the last place anyone would want to be. Except anywhere else, that is. Especially outside the walls of the FOB on the streets of Baghdad, where people are trying to kill you. Or even in the cubicle warren, where minutes go by like hours.

So all of that is good.

The negatives are that Abrams is not (yet) a Heller or a Vonnegut or a Norman Mailer. Abrams's heart is in the right place as he tries to convey the horror and absurdity of war -- horror that even bureaucrats must sometimes face -- but his talents don't match his ambition. The book never decides whether it's an out-and-out satire like Catch 22, a quasi-realist satire like the TV show M.A.S.H, or a real character-driven novel. So as a result the satire tends to be generally mild, while the character development is generally weak and predictable. And there are literally hundreds of minor instances of cringe-inducing sentences, metaphors, images. For example, early on a fobbit is described as purchasing a piece of bogus razor-sharp shrapnel on the eve of his return to the USA, something he can show friends as proof that he was really in a war. Abrams explains how the shrapnel was made from a junked car fender by an enterprising Iraqi using a ball peen hammer. But a ball peen hammer doesn't have a sharp edge and couldn't be used to make such a shard. This isn't bad writing, per se, but it's unfortunate. If he had just written "using a ball peen hammer and a cold chisel" there would have been no problem. I lay the blame for a lot of these errors at the feet of Abrams's editor.

I liked the book well enough to finish reading it. Abrams has passion and has given us an interesting look inside a Forward Operating Base, which is, I think a valuable contribution to our understanding of the whole war. Abrams is not a horrible writer, like, for example, Dan Brown. There's real potential there. But I do hope that on his next novel he works with an editor who makes more liberal use of the red ink.(less)

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Jul 16, 2012 Mindy McGinnis rated it 5 of 5 stars

FOBBIT by David Abrams is a fantastic masculine satire set during Operation Iraqi Freedom. For those of you who don't know, a Fobbit is a U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base. Each chapter sets you solidly in the boots of different soldiers and their perceptions of one another as they move through the sand-covered world of Iraq, with mortars flying overhead and situations so ridiculous they're only eclipsed by the fumbling efforts to contr...more

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Aug 10, 2012 Mieneke rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, fiction

Fobbit, being mainstream satiric fiction, is not my usual fare, but I love M*A*S*H, so the blurb caught my attention when Stefan (Civilian Reader) mentioned picking this up at BEA and I decided to ask for an ARC on Netgalley. I'm glad I did. While the book wasn't completely what I expected – I'd expected satire but not this biting – it was a quick and entertaining read.

The miniature community of a military compound in a combat zone magnifies human character traits, both the good and the bad. Fob...more Fobbit, being mainstream satiric fiction, is not my usual fare, but I love M*A*S*H, so the blurb caught my attention when Stefan (Civilian Reader) mentioned picking this up at BEA and I decided to ask for an ARC on Netgalley. I'm glad I did. While the book wasn't completely what I expected – I'd expected satire but not this biting – it was a quick and entertaining read.

The miniature community of a military compound in a combat zone magnifies human character traits, both the good and the bad. Fobbit, being a satire, tends to focus on the bad and ignoble; none of the characters are heroic, only a few are at all likeable, though perhaps some of them are uncomfortably relatable. Shrinkle and Harkleroad are downright awful. Neither of them shows much character growth; in fact their development is rather to their detriment. Shrinkle goes from a well-meaning but misguided klutz to an outright delusional liar and Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad, Harkleroad is a self-aggrandizing, dishonest incompetent. His emails home to his mother are both funny and deeply sad. I liked Lieutenant Colonel Duret and Sergeant Lumley, who seem to be cast in a far more positive light due to their active combat status. Both of them are shown to struggle with their experiences – Duret flees in fantasies of his wife and dog any time the stress gets to be too much and he is plagued by the memory of his brother-in-law who died during the 9/11 attacks – but both do the best they can despite their fears. Gooding is actually an okay guy, despite his not always very brave inner monologue, he's not a bad guy, just one who is out of his depth and mentally bruised and battered by all the death and tragedy he gets across his desk.

The story is told through chapters with alternating viewpoints. Within these chapters we find not only straightforward narrative, but also emails, letters and diary extracts from Gooding's diary. These extracts were my favourite, as their tone seemed sincere and somehow smoother. They formed almost a calm place inside the nervous action of the narrative. There are some passages written from the viewpoint of inanimate objects. While the first of these, from the EOD squad robot, was interesting and not as jarring, because it's easy to anthropomorphise a robot, the later ones, especially the mortar one, just came across as gimmicky and contrived. I also struggled with the extensive use of TLA's, though this may be because as a non-native English speaking civilian American military acronyms are largely unfamiliar to me. I liked that Abrams acknowledged the difficulties civilians have understanding these acronyms tacitly when he has Gooding coach a soldier on how to conduct an interview with the press, instructing him to avoid TLA's as civilians won't understand.

Despite my problems with some of the elements of the book, I did enjoy the writing and especially the dialogue. There was a lot of banter, especially between the combat troops, which was very enjoyable. Abrams creates distinctive voices for the different main characters; I was never confused as to whose viewpoint we were following at any given time. The humour is bleak, sarcastic and bordering on cynical, it's gallows humour of the kind that forces itself to laugh to keep from crying or going mad. The book paints a dark picture of how hard it is to get through a tour unscathed mentally if not physically; it's a sad tale of war, wrapped in a blanket of wry laughter. While funny the book is also thought-provoking as you wonder how much is true and how much satirical hyperbole. It also deepens respect for those men and women – of any nationality – who not only decide to step up and serve, but sign on for return tours as well.

The book is an easy read on a hard subject, but the end, when it came, was abrupt and rather disheartening, but that fit the tale that Abrams has spun the reader with Fobbit perfectly. I enjoyed Fobbit and read it in three sittings. As pointed out above, I did have my problems with it, but in the end Fobbit was an entertaining and thought-provoking read. The book is published by Grove Atlantic under their Black Cat imprint and will be released on September 4th.

The book was provided for review by the publisher.(less)

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Mar 27, 2013 Mac rated it 2 of 5 stars

At the beginning of Fobbit, there are several well told The Hurt Locker- type tense scenes, which are very dramatic and powerful. Throughout the book, the gruesomeness of war is evident--the danger, the dying, the maiming. And throughout the book, the absurdity of war is evident as well, particularly at the Forward Operating Base (FOB) where the staff pursues stupid, unproductive activities and waits for redeployment back home.

So the book presents the horrors and absurdities of war. What the boo...more

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Oct 25, 2012 Sheehan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was provisionally skeptical, a satirical look at a recent war has the potential to be a offensive, cheeky and disrespectful. Thankfully, Fobbit is none of the aforementioned, in fact it is a great novel, deftly exposing the absurdities of a non-warlike "green zone" (or Foward Operating Base, FOB) in the middle of a war zone.

Instead of blatantly listing the reasons it is insane to recreate creature comforts in a warzone, the author examines a number of archetypical roles in a FOB with a great...more I was provisionally skeptical, a satirical look at a recent war has the potential to be a offensive, cheeky and disrespectful. Thankfully, Fobbit is none of the aforementioned, in fact it is a great novel, deftly exposing the absurdities of a non-warlike "green zone" (or Foward Operating Base, FOB) in the middle of a war zone.

Instead of blatantly listing the reasons it is insane to recreate creature comforts in a warzone, the author examines a number of archetypical roles in a FOB with a great deal of care to explicate how the characters occupying that space see it and view one another. Taken as a whole, the book is a much better indictment of the "green zones" than anything explicit laundry-listing of problems ever could have been, a sum greater than it's composite parts sort of thing.

Abrams, a 20-year vet, weaves a tale of characters initially broken down between those who fight and interact with Iraq at large "outside the wire" of the FOB, and those who comprise the logistical machine within the safe zone, the "FOBbits" who never or infrequently leave the safety of the green zone. It is the 1st person perspectives which comprise the various chapters jostling the two perspectives which ultimately provide the holistic view of what was happening in these oasis-like spaces. If the story had just been a tale of Fobbits vs outside the wire folks it would have lacked the depth that came from also including perspectives: vertically (by rank/position), by nationality (US vs. Allied forces), and the non-combat foreign national support service workers; all of these perspectives when told en masse made for a conversation of what it was to be a Fobbit and/or venturing outside the wire.

While it is funny, it's Catch-22 funny, like, "damn, war is a ridiculous business", not laugh out loud funny...and I think this book works so well because of it. It will make one hell of a movie if someone ever picks it up, and doesn't try to Judd Apatow the narrative.

Some of the better fiction I have read this year, I say you check it out!(less)

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Mar 05, 2012 JDK1962 rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Iraq war's version of Catch-22. Abrams uses a small cast of narrators to paint a picture of life for the inhabitants of a Forward Operating Base (hence the title) in Baghdad, rarely venturing into the streets. The constant stream of casualties is conveyed second hand to Public Affairs and reduced to press releases by men whose only sight of blood might be from a botched IV line to correct severe dehydration. Most good war novels convey life in a war zone as long stretches of boredom punctuat...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Lee Razer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

This satire of life in a fortified army base on the outskirts of Baghdad during the US occupation of Iraq is based on the author's experiences as a public relations writer during the war. The "hero" of the novel is Chance Gooding, public affairs staff, who churns out press releases every day about theater of war activity as part of the Army's campaign to win the PR battle. He knows that his efforts are invariably useless, as by the time the Army's version of a "sig act" makes it way through the...more

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Nov 26, 2012 David Patneaude rated it 4 of 5 stars

Those of us who've been away from the military for a lot of years or who've never had the experience at all need to read this book. We need to be reminded or taught about the devastating fallout from elective wars and the sad absurdity with which they're fought. We need to meet the characters so well represented in these pages--zealots and bigots and incompetents and loafers and liars and sadists and patriots and dutiful plodders and vagrants and shirkers and spongers and drunks and misogynists...more

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Aug 16, 2012 Shelby rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary, first-reads

I won an uncorrected proof of this book in a Goodreads First Reads Giveaway.

I found this book to be a bit hard to get into, even though I had been very eager to start it. The first half of the book seemed to be a jumble of rehashed content, sometimes outlining characters that never (or very briefly) were mentioned again. I could not establish where the plot wanted to take me and became quite tired of hearing about Vic Duret's faceless wife and dog...

After reaching a plateau of sorts, I was glad...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Corbie Mumford rated it 2 of 5 stars

As a former U.S. Army soldier stationed in Iraq, who made fun of Fobbits quite frequently, I was so excited to read this book. In the beginning of the book, the author does a fabulous job of describing what those soldiers were like, finding such a humorous way to explain it. For the first 50 pages, this book had me laughing out loud and I couldn't put the book down. But at that point I was waiting for a plot to kick in. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting. I still feel like I'm waiting. But t...more

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Jan 02, 2013 Steve Kellam rated it 1 of 5 stars

I picked this book up at the bookstore on a whim. I usually enjoy novels about life in the military and about the irrational absurdity of a lot of the things that go on there. This book set out to chronicle the life of "Fobbits" in the U.S. Army. Admittedly, this would be an easy group to satirize. But even with the abdundance of potential material, the author fails to provide a compelling or even marginally entertaining story. The plot is very predictable and the ending was not particularly sat...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Shawn rated it 3 of 5 stars

Much of what I've read about this book compares it to Catch-22, and I can see some similarities, as both books spend time dealing with military bureaucracy. But while Catch-22 depicts an absurdly soul-crushing bureaucratic maze, Fobbit presents a more realistic view of the paperwork and command chains of the military. It's probably closer to The Office or Dilbert than it is to Catch-22. Because of this realistic bent, the book is just as much infuriating as it is funny. While we can laugh at the...more

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Sep 22, 2012 Scott added it

Shelves: comedy, fiction, satire

It's harder to determine which element from David Abrams' novel, "Fobbit" - the dark humor or the realism. Both elements make "Fobbit" one of the must-read books about America's military follies in the early 21st century.

As everyone now knows, a "Fobbit" is both a back-office member of the military at a Forward Operating Base and a spiritual cousin of J.R.R. Tolkien's most wonderful creation, a hobbit. More specifically, a Fobbit would be much more Baggins than Took - content to spend an entire...more It's harder to determine which element from David Abrams' novel, "Fobbit" - the dark humor or the realism. Both elements make "Fobbit" one of the must-read books about America's military follies in the early 21st century.

As everyone now knows, a "Fobbit" is both a back-office member of the military at a Forward Operating Base and a spiritual cousin of J.R.R. Tolkien's most wonderful creation, a hobbit. More specifically, a Fobbit would be much more Baggins than Took - content to spend an entire tour of duty comfortably sitting on his (or her) duff behind barricades, walls, and mountains of concertina wire without once having an adventure beyond the perimeter. "Fobbit" uses a revolving perspective mechanism a la George R. R. Martin or Jeff Shaara to tell the story from both Fobbit and real GI perspectives, but this is a story primarily by and about Fobbits.

Our primary Fobbit is a public affairs office, Chance Gooding (the names in this book are classic - Shrinkle, Duret, Lumley, etc.), who is our sane man in an insane war. Beset on all sides by the lunacy of war and the insanity of American military logic, Gooding is hanging on by a thread. We wonder what it will take to send this good guy over the edge, and Abrams throws lots of potential events at him. Maybe it will be yet one more ludicrously-worded press release. Maybe it will be another senseless briefing. Or maybe, just maybe, it will be the idiotic, purposeless death of an American GI in this ridiculous war.

If you grew up in the 70s, like I did, you remember all the jokes in 'MASH' about "military intelligence." "Fobbit" is filled with the same humor, only it's more akin to the movie's savage wit than the TV show's sentimental mockery.

Fueled by Abrams' real experiences as a military man serving overseas, "Fobbit" rings true even as it imbues mortar rounds with intelligence and American military officers with stupidity. This is one satire that feels as grounded in reality as it soars over the top - and that's not easy to do. Kudos to you, Mr. Abrams! (less)

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Mar 02, 2013 Melanie Cremins rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

http://dakimel.blogspot.com/2013/03/b...

War is fun! Okay, perhaps war isn't fun. But Abrams sure is. He took his experiences in the Iraq war and swirled them in a layer of sarcasm, a sprinkling of humanity, and leavened it with all the absurdity at his disposal. And it's yummy. A bitter trifle, sweetened by excellent comic timing and a plot that grows, almost without the reader noticing, to one of those perfectly constructed moments of ironic narrative inevitability.

Two things about the characte...more http://dakimel.blogspot.com/2013/03/b...

War is fun! Okay, perhaps war isn't fun. But Abrams sure is. He took his experiences in the Iraq war and swirled them in a layer of sarcasm, a sprinkling of humanity, and leavened it with all the absurdity at his disposal. And it's yummy. A bitter trifle, sweetened by excellent comic timing and a plot that grows, almost without the reader noticing, to one of those perfectly constructed moments of ironic narrative inevitability.

Two things about the characters: the primary narrative voice, Gooding, is far from foible-free, making sympathy with him something he really has to earn; and the secondary characters are deep enough, even the deeply flawed ones, to avoid caricaturization and blanket ridicule. Everyone has someone who loved him once, or the intention to behave properly, or something real and redeeming about him. And as much as the grunts outside of FOB Triumph dealing with daily life on the streets of Baghdad might look askance at the Fobbits in the air conditioning of Saddam's former palace, Abrams gives the back-office set enough of a purpose to somewhat balance the often ridiculous bureaucratic shell game they tend to be playing, day in and day out.

Some readers might tire of the constantly sarcastic tone, unless they're listening to Drummond's narration, when they will instead be laughing, then laughing, then laughing some more. Each character's distinctive, carefully planned (I have to presume) and perfectly gauged voice is a gem. He's also finely tracing, with his tone, the journey from, for example, writing an early press release about a KIA soldier, with all the fresh horror of the danger outside the gates and gruesome photos in the in-box uppermost, to the ennui of the third or fourth such report in a shift, when it's all about carefully parsing how much of a presence the Iraqi forces should be reported as having in the latest incident. Drummond and Abrams are one of those perfect narrator-author pairings, and I'm so glad I listened to this title as I tackled the Tournament of Books.(less)

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Dec 04, 2012 Bennett Gavrish rated it 2 of 5 stars

(Note: Grove Press provided me with a copy of Fobbit for the purpose of this review.)

Grade: D+

L/C Ratio: 30/70
(This means I estimate the author devoted 30% of his effort to creating a literary work of art and 70% of his effort to creating a commercial bestseller.)

Thematic Breakdown:
40% - Modern military operations
35% - Iraq
25% - Satire

I was intrigued to read Fobbit for a peculiar reason. It wasn't because of the plot description, or the setting, or the satire element. And it wasn't because I had...more

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Sep 22, 2012 Steven Gilchrist rated it 3 of 5 stars

As an unlucky soul who was deployed in the same exact location at same time as Abrams, I can honestly say that I liked this book. But i will tell you right now it is no "catch-22" for our generation as some other reviewers have proclaimed. Even though it wasn't very well written & found it as one of those "quick reads sitting on the bowl type books", the humor of the book was the irony in the truth of it all. I ran around z lake, dodged the same vats, remember the mass trampling at the adimi...more

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Feb 03, 2013 Christa Van rated it 3 of 5 stars

Fobbit is about the Iraq War but focuses on the group that stays "on base" The FOB or forward operating base is where the desk jockeys write press releases and everyone has a bed. There isn't any front line action but there are still plenty of issues. Not surprisingly, the troops out in the community kicking in doors and being hit with IEDs don't think all that highly of the troops stationed at the FOB and thus they are called fobbits. This book is told from the perspective of several of those s...more

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Jul 25, 2012 Alyson Hagy rated it 5 of 5 stars

The early reviews for this book are correct: an instant classic. War often produces wrenching, complex, insightful art, and FOBBIT is an example of that. I, for one, am sorry we ever sent a single soldier into Iraq, but we did. And the conflict has shown us (once again) how terrible and absurd and wasteful and poignant military action is. This is not a one-dimensional political novel. This is fiction about human behavior--its highs and lows, its losses and dark gains. Is FOBBIT funny? Yes. Abram...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Lance Charnes rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Fans of war satire

Shelves: fiction-satire

It took almost twenty years for the great World War Two books to start to appear; the same can be said for Vietnam books (to the extent that the books were set in Vietnam and not simply about the war, a la Catch-22). That means we can look forward to the first great Iraq War book in about ten years. In the meantime, we have David Abrams’ Fobbit.

Fobbit was for me an exercise in mixed feelings. Abrams nails the atmosphere, the places, the everyday life during a rear-area deployment in the Sandbox....more It took almost twenty years for the great World War Two books to start to appear; the same can be said for Vietnam books (to the extent that the books were set in Vietnam and not simply about the war, a la Catch-22). That means we can look forward to the first great Iraq War book in about ten years. In the meantime, we have David Abrams’ Fobbit.

Fobbit was for me an exercise in mixed feelings. Abrams nails the atmosphere, the places, the everyday life during a rear-area deployment in the Sandbox. I was briefly a fobbit-like creature in Qatar, which makes a cameo appearance partway through the book (the Topoff’s moved since you were there, Dave); I attended those meetings, I edited those PowerPoint slides, I read those SIGACTs, I sat in those operations centers with football or NASCAR on the big screen on Sundays. The rhythms of shifts in a windowless box, the inanities of staff work, the theme menus at the DFAC, the dusty little PX – been there, done that. All that part is spot-on.

However, some of the main caricatures (not a typo) pushed me out of the story. Fobbit has been compared to Catch-22, but the reason the latter has endured as one of the classic antiwar novels is that its characters, while tweaked, are essentially recognizable humans while the war and the system it engenders are the villains. Abrams, however, stocks his work with several major characters so grotesque that they can exist only as punching bags. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen an obese slob in uniform, far less an obese senior officer; I have to hope an infantry officer as spectacularly incompetent as Captain Shrinkle would’ve been weeded out before he pinned on his railroad tracks. Even the more solid characters – PR drudge SSG Gooding and battalion commander LTC Duret come to mind – fall into repetition of the qualities that make them types rather than humans. Ironically, Abrams’ secondary characters are more human and more believable than some of the major ones.

God knows there’s plenty to lampoon about our Iraq and Afghan misadventures. The constantly stirring spaghetti bowl that is HQ organization, the primacy of PowerPoint, the transplanted pieces of home that make the theater even more unreal, the ridiculous attempts by senior leadership to impose chaste wholesomeness on young men and women trained to be aggressive and physical, the drumbeat of the deployment calendar – these are the latest wrinkles on the human enterprise of war and make for great literary furniture. Fobbit touches on all of these, and more. But where Fobbit falls short – and what keeps us going back to Catch-22 and M*A*S*H and so on – is the story of how relatively normal people react to the stresses and absurdities of war. This is almost there, but it tries too hard and too many of its shots hit in the white.

Maybe in ten years we’ll get the Great Iraq War Book. Until then, you can give Fobbit a try. The self-satirizing world in which it’s set is as good a depiction as you’ll get, but keep a grain of salt or two for the characters.
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