In Country

In Country is deceivingly simple. The language is so straightforward and uncomplicated you think it was originally written for children. Here's the scoop: 17-year-old Sam acts obsessed with the Vietnam War. She lives with her vet uncle and pesters him daily about the possibility of Agent Orange reeking havoc with his health. He has bad acne on his face and strange headaches. Despite having a boyfriend her own age Sam also starts to fall in love with a local mechanic, another vet. To the average witness Sam's fixation with all things Vietnam is borderline mania, but Sam has good reason. The father she never knew was lost in the war. He died when she was only two months old. He never came home. No one knows very much about him and if they show more do they aren't saying much. As a result Sam feels her entire existence is shrouded in mystery. After being rejected by the vet and reading her father's journal Sam decides she needs a change of pace. She loads her uncle and paternal grandmother in her clunker car and travels from Kentucky to Washington D.C., to The Wall. There the entire family finds some sort of closure. show less

When Joel Conarroe reviewed Bobbie Ann Mason's first novel In Country (1985) for The New York Times, he described it as 'Shopping Mall Realism', which somehow doesn't quite hit the right button (1). But he was more exact when he said the book is 'light-years away from the young professionals sipping margaritas on Columbus Avenue', because Mason writes about a very different America from the glamorous San Francisco city centre.

Less than two years ago, I'd never heard of Bobbie Ann Mason when I drove through southern Illinois's Shaunee National Forest and over the Ohio River into Paducah, western Kentucky. We visited the quilt museum, but in a town with a population of only 26,000 there appeared to be not a tremendous amount more to see. show more And yet in In Country, in the ironically named small town of Hopewell - perhaps a pseudonym for Mayfield, where Mason was born - a visit to Paducah, its mall and its restaurants, is the highpoint of the week.

Sam Hughes is a late teenager and Conarroe finds her similar to characters in the fiction of Carson McCullers and Harper Lee, although the language is very different:

'The restroom is pink and filthy, with sticky floors. In her stall, Sam reads several phone numbers written in lipstick. A message says, "The mass of the ass plus the angle of the dangle equals the scream of the cream." She wishes she had known that one when she took algebra. She would have written it on an assignment.'

In a world where adolescent sexual witticisms are foregrounded to schooling, Sam's mental outlook seems both limited and limiting: there is an abundance of references to tradenames, TV programmes and commercials, and such singers as Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Boy George. As the book progresses, though, Sam's horizons widen, and this is symbolized by her buying a car, which is important to her self-discovery.

In Country is in part a quest novel, and Sam mentally sets out to find her father, who died in Vietnam, and who never saw his daughter. She does this by asking questions of people who knew him, and by reading his semi-literate letters and diary. This is also a protest novel, quietly raging against the horrors of the Vietnam war, and against the callous treatment ex-veterans receive. Sam lives with her Uncle Emmett, who appears to be suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. Soon tiring of her childish boyfriend, she tries to form a relationship with the older veteran Tom, but he is impotent: he is yet another of the walking wounded who carry the ghosts of Vietnam around with them.

The main part of the novel is a long flashback which is sandwiched between a road trip made by Emmett, Sam, and Sam's grandmother - who perhaps bears some resemblance to the grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' - in Sam's car, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

This is a very powerful and moving coming-of-age story detailing the effects of war, a story of the difficulty people have relating to each other. Oh and, er, let's not forget the frequent references to ham and mother-fuckers (2).

(1) The title refers to a GI expression for Vietnam.

(2) 'Mother-fuckers' is another GI expression, this time used for the loathed lima beans the soldiers were given to eat.

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I read Mason's Feather Crowns many years ago and was sort of so-so on it. I liked In Country quite a lot. In its spare 240ish pages, it captured a lot about what I can now imagine it must have felt like as an essentially orphaned kid of the 80s growing up in the aftermath of Vietnam. I don't think every line landed, but enough of them landed well to make this a worthwhile read.

rife with symbolism, this is quite a literary work; it will probably make you cry and it will probably make you angry but that's a good thing; it is all that great literature should be and among the best in the vietnam lit canon

Mason's major novel concerns a high school senior named Samantha whose father died very young in Viet Nam, never having seen his infant daughter. Samantha's mother has recently fled small-town Kentucky after mothering her own brother, an alienated Viet Nam vet, for many years. Sam now lives with this unfortunate uncle and attempts to fill her mother's vacated shoes.

Most of the book is devoted to Sam's efforts at getting any- and everyone around her to open up about the war experience. These passages are moving and effective. The final 30 pages seemed to me a bit forced as we move toward a crisis/gestalt moment in which Sam attempts to relive a semblance of her father's wartime experience. Nonetheless, I liked the shifty narrative, show more combining 3rd- and 1st-person points of view. I felt this brought the characters to life in an unusual way. show less

I found this a relatively quick and interesting read. You can't help but feel the aimlessness, of the Vietnam war, the veteran life, and the way those two things impacted other lives for years afterwards.

rife with symbolism, this is quite a literary work; it will probably make you cry and it will probably make you angry but that's a good thing; it is all that great literature should be and among the best in the vietnam lit canon