About Tim O'Brien: A Profile

The good news is that Tim O'Brien is writing fiction again.

In 1994, after his sixth book,
In the Lake of the Woods, was released, he distressed his many fans by vowing to stop writing fiction "for the foreseeable future." Then, a few months later, he published a now famous essay in
The New York Times Magazine that described his return to Vietnam. With his girlfriend at the time, he visited My Lai, where on March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers massacred an entire village in a matter of four hours -- women, children, old men, chickens, dogs. The body count ranged from two to five hundred.

From 1969-70, O'Brien had been an infantryman in the Quang Ngai province, and his platoon had been stationed in My Lai a year after the massacre. Then and now, he could feel the evil in the place, "the wickedness that soaks into your blood and heats up and starts to sizzle." In the
Times cover story, O'Brien elaborated on the complex associations of love and insanity that can boil over during a war, almost inevitably exploding into atrocity. But he went a step further, drawing parallels between the "guilt, depression, terror, shame" that infected both his Vietnam experience and his present life, especially now that his girlfriend had left him. Chillingly, he admitted, "Last night suicide was on my mind. Not whether, but how." This time, his fans were not the only ones concerned. Friends and strangers alike called him: shrinks to sign him up, clergymen to save his soul, people who thought he had disclosed way too much, others who thought he had disclosed too little.

Today, O'Brien has no regrets about publishing the article. He considers it one of the best things he has ever written. "I reread it maybe once every two months," he says, "just to remind myself what writing's for. I don't mean catharsis. I mean communication. It was a hard thing to do. It saved my life, but it was a fuck of a thing to print." After taking nine months off and pulling his life back together, O'Brien started another novel, intrigued enough by the first page to write a second, propelled, as always, by his fundamental faith in the power of storytelling.

Born in 1946, O'Brien was raised in small-town Minnesota, his father an insurance salesman, his mother an elementary school teacher. As a child, O'Brien was lonely, overweight, and a professed "dreamer," and he occupied himself by practicing magic tricks. For a brief time, he contemplated being a writer, inspired by some old clippings he'd found of his father's -- personal accounts about fighting in Iwo Jima and Okinawa that had been published in
The New York Times during World War II. When O'Brien entered college, however, his aspirations turned political. He was a political science major at Macalester, attended peace vigils and war protests, and planned to join the State Department to reform its policies. "I thought we needed people who were progressive and had the patience to try diplomacy instead of dropping bombs on people."

He never imagined he would be drafted upon graduation and actually sent to Vietnam. "I was walking around in a dream and repressing it all," he says, "thinking something would save my ass. Even getting on the plane for boot camp, I couldn't believe any of it was happening to me, someone who hated Boy Scouts and bugs and rifles." When he received his classification -- not as a clerk, or a driver, or a cook, but as an infantryman -- he seriously considered deserting to Canada. He now thinks it was an act of cowardice not to, particularly since he was against the war, but in 1969, as a twenty-two-year-old, he had feared the disapproval of his family and friends, his townspeople and country. He went to Vietnam and hated every minute of it, from beginning to end.

When he came back to the States, he had a Purple Heart (he was wounded by shrapnel from a hand grenade) and several publishing credits. Much like his father, he had written personal reports about the war that had made their way into Minnesota newspapers, and while pursuing a doctorate at the Harvard School of Government, O'Brien expanded on the vignettes to form a book,
If I Die in Combat, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. He sent it first to Knopf, whose editors had high praise for the book. Yet they were already publishing a book about Vietnam,
Dispatches by Michael Herr, and suggested that O'Brien try the editor Seymour Lawrence, who was in Boston. "He called me at my dormitory at Harvard," O'Brien recalls. "He said, 'Well, we're taking your book. Why don't you come over, I'll take you to lunch.' It was a big, drunken lunch at Trader Vic's in the old Statler Hilton, during the course of which we decided to fire my agent. Sam said, 'Look, you're not going to get much money, there's no way, might as well fire the guy. Why give him ten percent?' "

If I Die in Combat was published in 1973, just as O'Brien was being hired as a national affairs reporter for
The Washington Post, where he'd been an intern for two summers. "I didn't know the first thing about writing for a newspaper, but I learned fast," says O'Brien, who never took a writing workshop. The job helped tremendously in terms of discipline, which, O'Brien confesses, was a problem for him until then. "I learned the virtue of tenacity."

After his one-year stint at the
Post, O'Brien simply wrote books. In 1975, he published
Northern Lights, about two brothers -- one a war hero, the other a farm agent who stayed home in Minnesota -- who struggle to survive during a cross-country ski trip.
Going After Cacciato came out in 1978. In the novel, an infantryman named Cacciato deserts, deciding to walk from Southeast Asia to Paris for the peace talks. Paul Berlin is ordered to capture Cacciato, and narrates an extended meditation on what might have happened if Cacciato had made it all the way to Paris. The novel won the National Book Award over John Irving's
The World According to Garp and John Cheever's
Stories.

The Nuclear Age, about a draft dodger turned uranium speculator who is obsessed with the threat of nuclear holocaust, was released in 1985, and then, in 1990, came
The Things They Carried, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection of interrelated stories revolves around the men of Alpha Company, an infantry platoon in Vietnam. The title story is a recitation of the soldiers' weapons and gear, the metaphorical mixing with the mundane: they carried M-60's and C rations and Claymores, and "the common scent of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture." A central motif in the book is the process of storytelling itself, the way imagination and language and memory can blur fact, and why "story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."

In his latest novel,
In the Lake of the Woods, which is now in paperback, O'Brien takes this question of how much we can know about an event or a person one step further. John and Kathy Wade are staying at a secluded lakeside cottage in northern Minnesota. He has just lost a senatorial election by a landslide, after the revelation that he was among the soldiers at My Lai, a fact he has tried to conceal from everyone -- including his wife; even, pathologically, himself -- for twenty years. A week after their arrival at the lake, Wade's wife disappears. Perhaps she drowned, perhaps she ran away, perhaps Wade murdered her. The mystery is never solved, and the lack of a traditional ending has produced surprisingly vocal reactions from readers.

"I get
calls from people," O'Brien says. They ask questions, they offer their own opinions about what happened, they want to
know, missing the point of the novel, that life often does not offer solutions or resolutions, that it is impossible to know completely what secrets lurk within people. As the anonymous narrator, who has conducted a four-year investigation into the case, comments in a footnote: "It's human nature. We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible. ('I love you,' someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder -- 'Well, how much?' -- and when the answer comes -- 'With my whole heart' -- we then wonder about the wholeness of a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our wives, our fathers, our gods -- they are all beyond us."

O'Brien feels strongly that
In the Lake of the Woods is his best book to date, but it took its toll on him. He is a meticulous, some would say fanatical, craftsman. In general, he writes every day, all day. He does practically nothing else. He lifts weights, watches baseball, occasionally plays golf, and reads at night, but rarely ventures from his two-bedroom apartment near Harvard Square. He'll eke out the words, then discard them. It took him an entire year to finish nine pages of
The Nuclear Age, although he tossed out thousands.

Always, it will begin with an image, "a picture of a human being doing something." With
Going After Cacciato, it was the image of a guy walking to Paris: "I could see his back." With
The Things They Carried, it was "remembering all this crap I had on me and inside me, the physical and spiritual burdens." With
In the Lake of the Woods, it was a man and a woman lying on a porch in the fog along a lake: "I didn't know where the lake was at the time. I knew they were unhappy. I could feel the unhappiness in the fog. I didn't know what the unhappiness was about. It required me to write the next page. A lost election. Why was the election lost? My Lai. All of this was discovered after two years of writing."

But when O'Brien finished
In the Lake of the Woods, he stopped writing for the first time in over twenty years. "I was burned out," he says. "The novel went to the bottom of the well for me. I felt emotionally drained. I didn't see the point of writing anymore." In retrospect, the respite was good for him. He likens the hiatus to Michael Jordan's brief leave from basketball: "He may not be a better basketball player when he comes back, but he's going to be a better person."

Of course, the road back has not been easy, particularly with the loss of his editor and good friend, Sam Lawrence, who died in 1993. "Through the ups and downs of any writer's career, he was always there, with a new contract, and optimism. Another of his virtues was that he didn't push. Sam didn't give a shit if you missed a deadline. He wanted a good book, no matter how long it took." For the moment, O'Brien has yet to sign up with another publisher for his novel in progress, which opens with two boys building an airplane in their backyard. He prefers to avoid the pressure. "Maybe it's Midwestern," he says. "When I sign a contract, I think I owe them X dollars of literature."

And in defiance of some editors and critics, who suggest he should move on from Vietnam, he will in all likelihood continue to write about the war. "All writers revisit terrain. Shakespeare did it with kings, and Conrad did it with the ocean, and Faulkner did it with the South. It's an emotional and geographical terrain that's given to us by life. Vietnam is there the way childhood is for me. There's a line from Michael Herr: 'Vietnam's what we had instead of happy childhoods.' A funny, weird line, but there's some truth in it."

Yet to categorize O'Brien as merely a Vietnam War writer would be ludicrously unfair and simplistic. Any close examination of his books reveals there is something much more universal about them. As much as they are war stories, they are also love stories. That is why his readers are as apt to be female as male. "I think in every book I've written," O'Brien says, "I've had the twins of love and evil. They intertwine and intermix. They'll separate, sometimes, yet they're hooked the way valances are hooked together. The emotions in war and in our ordinary lives are, if not identical, damn similar."