Conversations with Tim O'Brien

The Heart under Stress: Interview with Author Tim O’Brien

120 The Heart under Stress: Interview with Author Tim O’Brien James Lindbloom/1998 From Gadfly March 1999. Web. http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/timobgadflyinterview0399 .html. Reprinted with permission of Gadfly Productions. After a notorious 1994 New York Times Magazine essay that was tantamount to a suicide note and a breakdown during a reading in Ann Arbor, Michigan, writer Tim O’Brien began, slowly, to confront his demons. If he made good on his promise of retirement, his stature would be assured; he has received the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for The Things They Carried. Happily, it was a promise he couldn’t keep. Tomcat in Love is a book that Tim O’Brien thought he’d never write. Although his previous novel, In the Lake of the Woods, was a critical and popular success, O’Brien announced that it was his last. The flashes of humor in O’Brien’s earlier works are given free rein in Tomcat in Love. An outrageous black comedy, the book is a portrait of a sexist, self-deluding linguistics professor who attempts to work through the anguish of a failed marriage by sabotaging his ex-wife’s new relationship. Though a comic novel may seem a departure for an author best known for his masterful fiction about combat experience, O’Brien insists that it is not. His subject has remained the same throughout all his books: the human heart under stress. Gadfly spoke to him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shortly after the promotional tour for Tomcat in Love, his newest novel. James Lindbloom: The critical reception of your new novel has been wildly polarized; some reviewers have loathed it, while others have called it a masterwork . What sort of reaction did you see on your recent book tour? JAMES LINDBLOOM / 1998 121 Tim O’Brien: Well, people don’t talk in terms of critical responses; they just laugh, or they don’t. They laughed, and that’s what I wanted with the book. Essentially, you want books to generate not just intellectual but visceral or emotional responses. In this case, you gauge it by the laugh-o-meter, sort of like the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, where they had that little meter going. And, for a change, that’s what I wanted to do with this book: to make people laugh at themselves, at the characters in the book, and at the human condition . So it was a good response. JL: At the two readings in the Twin Cities, the reaction was quite positive. I saw a few arched eyebrows and shakes of the head in response to some of the more outlandishly misogynistic statements made by Thomas Chippering , the narrator of Tomcat. But there were no irate walkouts, and during the question-and-answer sessions that followed, no one seemed to have dif- ficulty making the distinction between the flesh-and-blood author and his fictional creation. So no one read you the riot act at any of the readings? TO: No, it went well. JL: Your seven novels have established you as part of the canon of twentiethcentury American literature, yet your second novel, Northern Lights, has been out of print in the United States for some time. Is that your decision? TO: Yeah, it is. Dell has asked several times to reprint it, and I’ve said no. I want to rewrite it. If I could cut fifty to eighty pages out of it, I know I could make it a better book. As it is, it’s just overwritten. I think that’s a project that I’ll do some time in the next four or five years. It would take me a good six months to do it right, and it would also require some rewriting. But I think it could be a good book, if I were to put it on the Jenny Craig diet. I keep putting it off, because it’s something you can do when you’ve kind of lost your juice, and I haven’t lost it yet. JL: The question of memory—its veracity, its accuracy, and the role it plays in shaping our personal histories—has been a principal theme in your work, particularly The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods. How do you see the relationship between truth and memory? TO: Well, I think one has a little to do with...