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3.0 out of 5 stars
Certainly Not His Best Work, Jun 23 2004
It's interesting that the back cover of July, July, Tim O'Brien's latest novel, compares the author to Don DeLillo. Perceptively, and quite unintentionally, the comparison highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of July, July, exposing a deeply flawed book that still manages to engage the reader. While DeLillo's novels are either tightly constructed studies of one or a few characters or sprawling works like Underworld, with dozens of characters over 800 pages, O'Brien seems to be trying to cram the latter into the pages of the former. Too many characters in too little lead time lead to a book that is disappointing, and yet worth reading.The novel tells the story of a group of former students returning for their 30th anniversary at a small, fictional college in Minnesota. As one might expect, the characters are all wounded in some way-whether by rage, war, disease, or relationships, and these wounds are explored in context of the reunion and through periodic flashbacks. The characters are mostly quite interesting-the problem is that the novel, at a lean 300 pages, doesn't offer enough time to explore any of them in depth. As a result, the novel leaves strong impressions, but nothing more, about most of the characters, and I was left hoping for more information, and more resolution. O'Brien also makes some poor choices about how he allocates his pages. Some characters are not terribly interesting, and we keep returning to them. Each time the novel returned to the two women sitting in their dorm room talking, I wanted to flip ahead, to the more interesting characters in conflict. Some of these vignettes are fascinating, with deep characters that you want to return to. Billy's struggle to overcome his unhappiness after the fleeing the country for Canada during the Vietnam War, for example, is particularly compelling, as is David's battle to regain his wife and deal with his demons from the war. When the story is focused on these characters, the writing is tight and engaging, and you get the strong impression that O'Brien is more interested in their stories as well. Criticisms aside, July, July does offer the usual O'Brien strengths-tight storytelling about characters that are complex and yet credible. July, July might be worth reading for lines like Right now, for instance, she did not say, "Billy, I love you more than anything," because she did not love him more than anything. She loved cashmere." alone. Despite missteps in this work, O'Brien can still often say more in a passage than most authors can in a chapter.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Plot, anyone?, Jun 23 2004
Yes, Tim O'Brian is certainly a very good writer... his command of the language, his characterizations, narrative, dialogue, etc. Unfortunately, I expected a lot more when I bought this book. It's an interesting slice-of-life, made better by some interesting characters and scenes. But what else? I didn't expect a rock-em sock-em thriller - I expected a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. He gave us the beginning, but the middle just went on and on, all the way to the last page.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Surprisingly weak effort, Feb 20 2004
O'Brien wrote two books that I consider superior works of modern fiction: "In the Lake of the Woods" and "The Things They Carried" (which I rank with "Paco's Story" as one of the two best pieces of literature to emerge from the Vietnam War). Unfortunately, he fails to approach that level of writing with "July July," a largely hackeneyed effort to resurrect the old high school reunion plot device.The occasion for the work is a gathering of late '60s high school graduates, all of whom, of course, have failed to live up to the idealistic dreams of youth, etc., etc. We've been in this territory before, but the reader hopes that O'Brien's considerable writing skills will lift him above the book's mundance premise. Alas, it is not to be, and there are at least three reason for the failure. First, as in a book I recently reviewed, Richard Price's "Samaritan," too much of the novel relies on characters telling other characters what happened to them years before, rather than relating the actions as they occurred. Second, there is often insufficient motivation for characters to even relate these stories -- which, by the way, are often fantastic and strain credulity. For example, one character who has become a church minister relates to a former classmate she hasn't seen for 30+ years a strange story of a clandestine relationship with a man many years her senior and her attempt to break into his house to steal letters documenting the "affair" -- an effort which ended in her dismissal from the parish. We're left to wonder not only why she would reveal all of this, but what in the world would have driven this character to act in the way she did. Since we know very little about her as a younger woman, it's impossible to say. O'Brien succeeds only when he returns to the ground on which he is most confident: the soil of wartime Vietnam. In the book's most affecting section, he details the life-changing injury one of his characters suffers in a suprise attack during the war. The descriptions of the vet's difficulties in his marriage after returning from Vietnam also ring true and are sensitively rendered. When O'Brien strays from this turf, however, he struggles, and the novel limps to an unsatisfying end. The reader is left wondering what he knows about the characters he has met during this weekend of carousing and reminiscing, and the conclusion is not much -- and he doesn't believe, in most cases, that any of it could have possibly happened anyway in the way O'Brien describes anyway. For readers new to O'Brien, skip this one and move directly to the two aforementioned works or "Going After Cacciato."
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