“America Fantastica,” the latest and perhaps last book by Austin, Texas, novelist Tim O’Brien, yanks off the Vietnam War writer tag that has long dogged the author of “Going After Cacciato” and “The Things They Carried.”
“I am pegged as a Vietnam writer. That’s going to be my obituary. I know that for sure, and I don’t like it,” says O’Brien, who describes himself as “a writer writer.”
“America Fantastica,” which came out Oct. 24, is a sunlit noir about a suicidal ex-journalist on a revenge-laced road trip that commences in bank robbery before riding into kinky redemption.
It reads like an Elmore Leonard take on a Coen brothers comedy.
“I think it’s going to surprise people. It surprised me,” O’Brien says. “But I fear reviewers are going to say it’s not ‘The Things They Carried.’ And all I can say to myself is, thank God. Of course it’s not. I mean, why would you rewrite a book?”
Writing a satirical thriller crowded with ex-cons, crooked cops and a pathological liar with a press badge was fun for O’Brien.
“Part of being a novelist is you’ve got to try to imagine the lives of others who are unlike you. Put yourself in their skins as much as you can and go for the ride, and with each of these characters it was fun going for the ride,” O’Brien says.
“America Fantastica” is high-caliber crime fiction about the lies people tell themselves just to live and the dangerous falsehoods that threaten civil discourse and civilization itself.
“2016, 2019, 2020 … did not pop up out of nowhere,” O’Brien says, referring to the political polarization in the nation. “I am not going to put my head in the sand and not write about it. I would feel sick. It would be like going to Vietnam and not writing about it.”
Moral imperatives aside, “America Fantastica” is an apology for the inner fantasies that fuel the republic. “I have them, probably you have them. If nothing else, it’s that tomorrow will be better than today: the happy-ever-after fantasy,” says O’Brien, who insists this will be his last book. “But the reality we all know is otherwise.”
