Posts
August 16, 2020
Best of TomDispatch: Beverly Gologorsky, My Neighbor, War
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: At the moment, Americans are dying en masse from a still-spreading virus -- the latest estimate: nearly 300,000 dead by December 1, 2020 -- thanks significantly to the ministrations of a self-proclaimed “wartime president.” Meanwhile, the wars the U.S. has been fighting nonstop under the rubric of “the war on terror” have finally been rejected by three-quarters of Americans and yet they’ve come home to the streets of this country via militarized police forces and federal agents dressed
as if for its forever-war battlefields. And sadly, no matter that
Donald Trump claimed he would end this country’s distant conflicts, they
only threaten to expand (to Iran).
At such a moment, I went back to novelist Beverly Gologorsky’s deeply
personal 2013 tale of a life shadowed by war and, sadly, it seemed no
less apt seven years later.
When you come from New York City’s South Bronx, as
Gologorsky does, you can write about different kinds of characters than
those who so often inhabit the universe of fiction we’re used to. That
was true of her first novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home,
which focused on the lost vets of the Vietnam era, their wives, and
their children, all desperately trying to get by in a world that was
anything but welcoming. It was no less true of the crew who worked in
the roadside diner in her second novel, Stop Here,
a kind of home away from home in an American world shadowed by war and
financial disaster. And it’s even more powerfully so in her recent
Dispatch Books novel, Every Body Has a Story,
about two couples who barely made it out of the South Bronx and into
middle-class homes before disaster struck and two administrations
focused their attention on those who were “too big to fail,” rather than
those who were too small not to be clobbered by the foreclosure crisis
of 2007-2008.
So check out that 2013 piece of hers (and my intro to
it) below -- it’s a little classic in my opinion -- and then pick up a
copy of her latest book. I've edited her work for years and, believe
me, she’s a one-of-a-kind author! Tom]
In the years when I was growing up more or less middle
class, American war on the childhood front couldn’t have been sunnier.
True, American soldiers were fighting a grim new stalemate of a conflict
in Korea and we kids often enough found ourselves crouched under our school desks
practicing for the nuclear destruction of our neighborhoods, but the
culture was still focused on World War II. Enter a movie theater then
and as just about any war flick ended, the Air Force arrived in the nick
of time, the Marines eternally advanced, and victory was ours, a God-given trait of the American way of life.
In those days, it was still easy to present war sunny-side
up. After all, you couldn’t go wrong with the Good War -- not that
anyone called it that until Studs Terkel put
the phrase into the language and the culture dropped the quote marks
with which he carefully encircled it. And if your Dad, who had served
in one of the great draft armies of our history, sat beside you silently
in that movie theater while John Wayne saved the world, never saying a
word about his war (except in rare and sudden outbursts of anger), well,
that was no problem. His silence only encouraged you to feel that,
given what you’d seen at the movies (not to speak of on TV, in books, in comics, and more or less anywhere else), you already understood his experience and it had been grand indeed.
And then, of course, we boys went into the parks,
backyards, or fields and practiced making war the American way, shooting
commies, or Ruskies, or Indians, or Japs, or Nazis with toy guns (or
sticks). It may not sound pretty anymore, but take my word for it, it
was glorious back when.
More than half a century later, those movies are relics of
the neolithic era. The toy six-shooters I once holstered and strapped
to my waist, along with the green plastic soldiers
that I used to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima or Normandy, are somewhere
in the trash heap of time. And in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan, who believes that America has a God-given right to victory?
Still, I have a few relics from that era, lead Civil War and Indian
War-style soldiers who, more than half a century ago, fought out
elaborate battles on my floor, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that
holding one for a moment doesn’t give me some faint wash of emotion from
another age. That emotion, so much stronger then, sent thousands of
young Americans into Vietnam dreaming of John Wayne.
These days, post-Vietnam, post-9/11, no one rides to the
rescue, “victory” is no longer in our possession, and for the first time
in memory, a majority of the public thinks Washington should “mind its own business” globally when it comes to war-making. Not surprisingly, in an America that’s lost its appetite
for war, such conflicts are far more embattled, so much less onscreen,
and as novelist Beverly Gologorsky writes today, unacknowledged in much
of American fiction.
There was nothing sunny about war, even in the 1950s, for
the young, working-class Gologorsky. If my childhood was, in a sense,
lit by war and by a 24/7 economy in which the same giant corporations
built ever larger cars and missiles, television consoles and submarines,
hers was shadowed by it. She sensed, far more than I, the truth of war
that lay in our future. That shadowing is the essence of her deeply
moving “Vietnam” novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, and her just-published second novel, Stop Here,
a book that comes to grips in a way both subtle and heart-rending with
the Iraq and Afghan wars without ever leaving the environs of a diner in
Long Island, New York.Tom
In the Shadow of War
Life and Fiction in Twenty-First-Century America
By Beverly GologorskyI’m a voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just wouldn’t know that -- a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside -- from the novels that are generally published. For at least a decade, Americans have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably little evidence of it.
As for myself -- I’m a novelist -- I find that no matter what I chose to write about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam vets coming home and my second is permeated with a shadowy sense of what the Iraq and Afghan wars have done to us. And yet I’ve never been to, or near, a war, and nothing about it attracts me. So why is it always lurking there? Recently, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about just why that might be and I may finally have a very partial answer, very modestly encapsulated in one rather un-American word: class.
No comments:
Post a Comment