BOOK REVIEW: TIM O'BRIEN'S "GOING AFTER CACCIATO"

Imagination, like reality, has its limits. -- Tim O'Brien

This is a remarkable book, meaning literally worthy of remark. It is not going to be to everyone's taste, and was often not to mine; I cannot however help admiring author Tim O'Brien for writing it.

GOING AFTER CACCIATIO is about a squad of American soldiers in Vietnam, tasked with hunting down a deserter named Cacciato, who leaves a note saying he's ditching the war and walking to Pairs. As they follow the elusive, enigmatic deserter deeper and deeper into the jungle, soldier Paul Berlin reflects on Cacciato, the various members of his platoon living and dead, his life back home, and the chances of Cacciato reaching his goal, 8,600 miles away. Eventually Berlin's imagination runs away with him, and the hard-boiled narrative of grunt life dissolves into a full-on "phantasy," in which the squad travels through the cities of the Far and Middle East to Europe, always hunting Cacciato and always missing him, until at last they arrive in Paris for the final --? -- showdown. Meanwhile, Paul Berlin, through an imaginary female companion he has conjured from his own mind, argues with himself about duty and possibility and ugly necessity as they relate to war. He reflects upon war itself and the way it manifests differently within each soldier who fights it. Through the real and imagined people Berlin encounters or remembers, we get such gems as this:

"It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.”

One of the central themes of CACCIATO -- it has many, perhaps too many for its own comprehensibility and flow, but so does every work of overflowing genius -- is whether the possibility of a thing is determined by mathematical odds and logic and so forth, or merely by will-power and daring. Paul Berlin seems to be a metaphor, an allegory if you will, for the ordinary decent American boy/human being who is nonetheless confined, cramped, even incarcerated within limitations imposed by society and by himself. By tribal mores and the expectations of his neighbors and relations. He asks himself, and is frequently asked: “What happened, and what might have happened?” And in a real sense the entire book is a wobbly balance between those two things -- reality and imagination.

CACCIATO is definitely one of the more imaginative novels I've read in many a year: off the top of my head only Ernst Jünger's interweave of the everyday and the fantasic in novels like THE GLASS BEES or ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS come to mind as standing with this ordinary, decent soldier's fever-dream. O'Brien, a Nam vet who penned several classic memoirs and novels about his service there, is attempting here to ask huge questions about the way morality and even sanity work in a war context. And he understands that it is different for everyone and contains a great deal of what seem to be paradoxes or contradictions. A soldier can hate the war and still revile the judgments civilians make about the war. He can believe in the war and not glorify it or have a sense of passion about it. He can hate both being in a war and being a soldier and yet embrace both because of his sense of duty. He can understand and empathize with Cacciato's decision to desert while despising him for being a deserter.

O'Brien does not romanticize his soldiers, nor does he allow them to be tainted by any judgment. He presents them as ordinary men who have worked out their own way of dealing with an impossible situation and are somewhat beyond armchair analysis. Most hate the war and are barely in the army in a meaningful sense, even plotting murder when they deem it necessary, but they have a strong if eccentric sense of duty and even of honor, all of which comes out in context. There is one chapter describing Berlin's march into his first battle -- not the battle, the long mountain climb into it -- which is a masterpiece of character study and of description, not unmixed with irony, and passages like that make CACCIATO unforgettable. O'Brien is not some guy who served in a war 50 years ago and made a career and a life kicking coins and candy out of that Piñata. He clearly took away life lessons and observations which changed him deeply and affected profoundly his way of looking at the world. Not just war -- the world, existence, life.

The issue I had with the novel, and it is a large one, is that the fantasy elements, except for some in the early-middle and the last few chapters, become somewhat tedious and over-wrought as they go on. I realize some of this was probably by design, but that didn't make it more engaging to read. I was much more interested in Berlin's reminiscences of, for example, Sydney Martin, the earnest, fearless, rigid-minded, ultimately doomed lieutenant who was deemed too dedicated for everyone's good own good by his men, than I was by Berlin's increasingly fantastic daydreams. I had to penalize my rating fairly heavily for this.

So, in the end I found this book a bit of a slog at times despite its daring and its brilliance, and yet I have very little doubt I'm going to read it again, which I can't say of many books I've given five stars. Make of that what you will, and consider this as you do:

“You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”