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rosseroo's review
5.0
I pray that with the release of the film based on this book that more people will discover O'Connor's amazing (and only) novel. Set at an U.S. Army base in Mannheim, Western Germany, in what appears to be the mid-'80s (based on the TV shows mentioned), the story follows Specialist Elwood. A classic antihero, this clerk/personal assistant to the battalion CO knows just what papers to push in order to get things done and build up piles of owed "favors". This comes in very handy since his main concern is to maximize profits from his slice of the camp drug trade.
The base comes instantly alive a place of very real danger-rather like a prison-with its racial separate gangs, drug wars, and general mayhem. As Elwood explains, in the peacetime Army there are two kinds of people: the MFers and the MF'd-and he hustles daily to stay in the first category. He's a great dark character, an amoral piece of total scum who you somehow end up liking and hoping will get straightened out. In that respect he's very much like Monty, in David Benioff's excellent novel The 25th Hour. As the book progresses, there a shift develops inside Elwood and the tension starts to build as he sets up one big final score before getting out of the Army. The fly in the ointment is that Elwood is being very closely watched by Master Sgt. Lee, a veteran of three Vietnam tours and a many with an unerring ability to detect BS.
Awash with dark subject matter (drugs, racial fights, exploitative sex), the book is remarkably funny and hard to put down. O'Connor, a writing professor who apparently never served in the Army, manages to infuse his writing with crackling Army slang and idiom specific to the setting. It's hard to overemphasize just how good the dialogue and wordplay is throughout the book. Throughout the book people are telling stories over other people's conversations, and it's all pulled off with dazzling dexterity. And perhaps the greatest testament to O'Connor's skill is that the ending is not unexpected, and yet is still incredibly powerful.
This novel is a piercing depiction of the underbelly of peacetime Army life and invites instant comparisons to Catch-22, while its somewhat unusual second person narration invokes Bright Lights, Big City. Many will find this depiction of peacetime Army life to be deeply offensive and unpatriotic, but it's hard to know just how far from reality it is. In any event, the reality of it doesn't matter, 'cause the book is less a satire of the Army than a dark portrait of a lost soul. Great stuff which leads one to wonder why O'Connor hasn't published anything else in the last ten years.
The base comes instantly alive a place of very real danger-rather like a prison-with its racial separate gangs, drug wars, and general mayhem. As Elwood explains, in the peacetime Army there are two kinds of people: the MFers and the MF'd-and he hustles daily to stay in the first category. He's a great dark character, an amoral piece of total scum who you somehow end up liking and hoping will get straightened out. In that respect he's very much like Monty, in David Benioff's excellent novel The 25th Hour. As the book progresses, there a shift develops inside Elwood and the tension starts to build as he sets up one big final score before getting out of the Army. The fly in the ointment is that Elwood is being very closely watched by Master Sgt. Lee, a veteran of three Vietnam tours and a many with an unerring ability to detect BS.
Awash with dark subject matter (drugs, racial fights, exploitative sex), the book is remarkably funny and hard to put down. O'Connor, a writing professor who apparently never served in the Army, manages to infuse his writing with crackling Army slang and idiom specific to the setting. It's hard to overemphasize just how good the dialogue and wordplay is throughout the book. Throughout the book people are telling stories over other people's conversations, and it's all pulled off with dazzling dexterity. And perhaps the greatest testament to O'Connor's skill is that the ending is not unexpected, and yet is still incredibly powerful.
This novel is a piercing depiction of the underbelly of peacetime Army life and invites instant comparisons to Catch-22, while its somewhat unusual second person narration invokes Bright Lights, Big City. Many will find this depiction of peacetime Army life to be deeply offensive and unpatriotic, but it's hard to know just how far from reality it is. In any event, the reality of it doesn't matter, 'cause the book is less a satire of the Army than a dark portrait of a lost soul. Great stuff which leads one to wonder why O'Connor hasn't published anything else in the last ten years.
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