Great Books for Teenaged Boys: No. 2 - Why Are We In Vietnam?
/OK, the great Norman Mailer, who died earlier this month: his best book, if you are a teenage boy, is Why Are We In Vietnam? (I would have put it on the list anyway, even if he hadn't just died.)
I had my notebook with me over the weekend (I was away from my computer), and I wrote
so many notes on Why Are We In Vietnam? that it would take me another week to type them up and turn them into something that made sense. It was more a long essay than a blog entry.
But Ariel is waiting for his next book, and I can't make him wait another week. So here goes... Inna blog styleeee, fukktup, no gramma...
Norman Mailer wrote Why Are We In Vietnam? around the time I was still in the womb. It came out in 1967 and it was red-hot relevant to the big American dilemma: why the fuck are we in Vietnam?
What is it about? Well in some ways it's a shaggy dog story, or a shaggy bear story, or a shaggy war story... And that story is pretty simple: DJ and his friend, two Texan teenage boys, go on a hunting trip to Alaska with their rich fathers. They shoot animals, and they walk in the forests. DJ tells the tale in a supercharged Texas-turboblast of language.
But it's about what it's not about. And it's not about what it's about.
The title does half the work of the book, because it changes the meaning of every sentence that follows. Vietnam is hardly mentioned. But DJ and his friend have been drafted, and are going to Vietnam after this last trip with their fathers.
Mailer has knowledge of war (he fought in the Pacific in World War Two): DJ has not. But DJ will soon have Mailer's knowledge and the gap between character and author, so soon to be closed, crackles with literary electricity. The knowledge wants to discharge.: DJ wants to know, and Mailer wants him to know. Soon the trees, the animals, the guns are trying to tell him... The book contains some of the best ever descriptions of animals, plants, trees and soil (of the world without man in it). And then man comes into it...
The book is full of sex, shit and death, and of words invoking sex shit and death even when the subject is something else. Sex shit and death are the three-in-one God of this book, and it is best to hear these words as the (almost religious) speaking-in-tongues of a possessed young man, rather than as casual and meaningless obscenities. They are not casual and they are not meaningless (though they are often obscene, if the Latin root of obscene is ob caenum, "from filth").
A book in which rich Americans shoot animals from helicopters is obviously about 1960s Vietnam in a fairly direct way. But that is not the most important aspect of the book.
This book is not a history book. This book is prophecy, and thus timeless. You could slot it into the Bible as the Book of DJ, and it would fit in fine. To give the book its original force, and to totally refresh it, just scratch or paint out the word "Vietnam" on the cover, and scrawl in the word "Iraq", if you're American or British, "Chechnya" if you're Russian, "Tibet" if you're Chinese, "Palestine" if you're Israeli, "Congo" if you're from practically any of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's neighbours, "Darfur" if you're from Sudan, "Somalia" if you're from Ethiopia...
No really, do it. Make a physical mark. Damage the book. Make it yours.
It is not a clean and tidy book. It is not a nice, easy book. It is not a post-feminist book. It is not a left-liberal book. It's not even a "good" book, in a lot of ways (though it might be a great book). It doesn't give a shit whether you like it or not. A lot of recent readers have problems with that, as they do with Norman Mailer generally. But you cannot apply health and safety legislation to a shaman. The chicken has to really die (because you're going to really die). The blood has to splatter everywhere (because your atoms, too, will be scattered, and your pattern lost). Norman Mailer's art is messy because life is messy because death is messy.
OK that's it. That's all I can think of right now. Over to you.