Anywhere, Anywhere

by Tim Barrus

Book by Barrus, Tim

239 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Karl Kraus]

Tim Barrus is known to the literary world first and foremost as a fraud, having written three first-hand accounts of life as a Navajo under a Navajo-ish pseudonym without actually being Navajo. Before that, he was known primarily as an author of gay erotica without actually being -- as far as anyone seems to know -- gay. *Anywhere, Anywhere* would therefore seem to be a twofer, as it's a first-person account of going through the hell that was the Vietnam War as a gay American soldier without the author's having been to Vietnam, the author's claims notwithstanding. But it would be wrong to dismiss this book as a fraud, because it is a well written work of imaginative fiction that does *not* play fast and loose with the historical record.

Unlike the author's notorious "Nasdijj" books, the first-person narrator here is not explicitly identified as the author; in fact, the two are at least implicitly separate. Barrus dedicated *Anywhere, Anywhere* to his daughter Kree, "who has gone through more wars and lovers (staunchly, stubbornly) at her less than sane father's side than any child should have to face", and at the time of the dedication Kree would've been 12 years old. It's also worth noting that at no point does anyone in the novel call the first-person narrator Tim; he is always "Boss". But what about the novel itself?

Compared with *The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up", which I read a few weeks ago, the relation of horrors is less emotionally distant -- there's no need to strike poses for the recipients of that novel's series of letters -- but matter-of-fact enough to avoid engaging in histrionics or hysterics. The writing is demotic throughout, but eloquently so. And I imagine that Barrus has read his Dos Passos, if not his *Berlin Alexanderplatz*, because the narration even has its own soundtrack, cunningly employing snippets of lyrics from songs by Elvis, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, and a few others. The structuring of the narrative is also artful in a good way. Returning from war, "Boss" finds himself unable to become a part of either the gay community or society at large; he does, however, end up bonding with Chris, a wartime buddy of his, now disabled (Barrus has probably also read his Ron Kovic), and even spending Christmas with Chris's family -- with decidedly mixed results. Flashbacks accentuate the fate of Billy, another wartime buddy, whose last pre-suicidal call for help cuts the visit short.

The novel has one obvious flaw: the poems that preface each of the chapters are, well, not very good. I also found the content of much of the last chapter to be a bit too, well, heartwarming in a Hallmark Special kind of way. But it would be churlish of me to begrudge a handful of guys who'd been through hell a happy ending, so four stars.

[Liam Ostermann]

review and discussion soon