On Sunday, May 5th, 2013, the oceanfront town of Lincoln City, OR set a record temperature of 86 degrees. I know, both because I read about it and because I was there. This heat spike, 32 degrees above average, filled an Oregon coast most often described (and rightfully praised) as brooding or atmospheric with more bouncing bikinis than the whole state typically sees in a year. Beach volleyball was played. Bodies were tanned. For a brief, sundazzled flicker, Oregon put on our best California sundress. And it made us nervous, and not just because we’re not used to showing so much fog-tossed fishskin so early in the season. Weather has become impossible to enjoy under these circumstances, not just because I picked up one of the worst sunburns of my life (probably due to the sheer impossibility of sunburn on the Oregon coast in early May), but because of the peculiar sense of meteorological menace with which we have been infected. Weather is not weather now - it is the harbinger of something else, each outlier event less a cause for celebration (it’s 80 degrees in May!) as despair (it’s HAPPENING!). I caught myself repeating the same thought over and over within the mechanics of catching and throwing a frisbee again and again - “This is the warmest it has ever been, ever. This the warmest it has ever been, ever.” Assuming for the moment that the panicking climatologists are not the architects of a grand Democratic feint against freedom or the agents of a Satanic New World Order, it is not at all irrational to view each outlying weather event, especially on the warm side, as another far off gunshot signaling darker things to come, food shortages and killer tornadoes and endless droughts and mass extinctions, all of which are allegedly just far enough over the horizon that my kids will have to deal with it even if I’m lucky enough to check out just prior. The premise may not necessarily compel the conclusion, but the conclusion still hangs around, looking worried and keeping us all up at night. So if it is then also true that this pending tipping point, catastrophic feedback loop or whatever is already on its way or basically inescapable, both because of the lag in meteorological response time and due to our apparent incapacity to take species-wide collective action, it is again entirely rational to wonder how best to respond to the possibility if not likelihood that you will soon be living through the apocalypse.Of course, how you process this information is up to you.I see the most obvious option as looking about like this, much simplified:Most of us will simply ignore the possibility of the Bad Thing About To Happen and continue to live as though the threat is fictional. Thinking about the apocalypse is profoundly self-nullifying unless you are Tom Cruise or Frodo Baggins, in which case it is profoundly self-aggrandizing. For the rest of us, climate change is something to be experienced as a spectator, a victim and, ultimately, a statistic. The heroic narratives of rescue and redemption will occur, but most of us will be excluded. While we are, of course, “all to blame”, this blame is too dilute to prompt any real feeling of guilt or action and besides, AND BESIDES, what you do won’t matter unless everyone else does it too, and they won’t, so you won’t either. Buying a better lightbulb makes you feel better, sure, but it hardly offsets your car and refrigerator, not to mention the millions of cars and refrigerators the Chinese, Brazilians and Indians want and deserve just as much as you do. Easiest best not to think about it.Of course, you could just build a bunker.Tim O Brien’s “The Nuclear Age” takes the second approach. Swapping in Vietnam’s specter of nuclear annihilation for climate change, O’Brien’s protagonist William appears in non-chronological snapshots - as a scared child cowering underneath a ping-pong table lined with pencils (the lead will fight off the radiation), as a proto-emo teenager holding a sign reading “THE BOMBS ARE REAL” at the school cafeteria, as a failed adult revolutionary and draft dodger and, most significantly, as a middle aged man digging an underground bunker out from the guts of his suburban lawn while his daughter looks on and his wife starts packing her bags. Of course, like every book by O’Brien, this one is really about Vietnam, but also about the smallness of knowledge and the impossibility of connecting with anyone, the intensely private nature of trauma and the inescapable feeling that nobody really gets it, even and especially the people who were there or who are supposed to be in charge. Sandwiched chronologically between Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, both probably superior, The Nuclear Age mostly ditches the open warfare between the narrator and the reader as to the impossibility of telling a true war story and instead shrugs and tells a story that isn’t true at all. O’Brien has never been good with dialogue and The Nuclear Age is a particularly bad example - every character talks with the same voice, a clipped, overly pithy distance that I’ve always taken as suggesting just how bad we are at even basic self-expression, especially to the people we care about. William uses words to avoid communicating. Bobbi, his wife, communicates only with crappy poetry. There are more adventurous interludes interspersed throughout involving his association with a band of low-level pseudo revolutionaries, all of which seem false, another Cacciato style trick to headfake an action movie plotline to make an emotional or psychological point, and not as well executed.So why four stars: It’s hard to argue with the guy. If the bombs are real, digging a hole is as valid a response as any. O’Brien considers and rejects the possibility of revolt, acquiescence, complicity. The Nuclear Age is happy to wonder if insanity and well-preparedness might necessarily overlap and allows us to be fully frustrated with our options. We will, he argues, all eventually be caught fatally flat-footed when the typhoon comes, even if we were warned repeatedly of its coming. Better to dig a hole, put your wife in it with you, and go to sleep. Rational paranoia, well-founded crazy. People get dangerous when they’re desperate, and the people who aren’t desperate aren’t being honest with themselves.This theme goes rancid in The Lake of the Woods, published several years later, and a book so dark that O’Brien’s publishers apparently told him to cool it with the nail-chewing PTSD - afterward he wrote a string of yucky romances and ultimately retired to academia. I won’t spoil the punchline of The Lake of the Woods, but it overextends the possibility introduced here into something close to horror - all of this anxiety can easily spill its banks and drown your friends and neighbors, but one of the great tricks of this narrative is that you never quite get whether this is ultimately a tale of redemption or of double murder. I’m not recommending Lake of the Woods - it’s not quite worth the endless heebie-jeebies - but I feel like it goes all of the way. The Nuclear Age ultimately blinks in the face of its own obsession with annihilation. O’Brien writes one book - just one, that one - without a flicker of a blink. But this one certainly goes down easier.
Salon wrote of Tim O'Brien, that for every masterpiece he'd written there was a corresponding stinker. Unfortunately, The Nuclear Age does not stand up against The Things They Carried, Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods. But there is a magical scene within it. The protagonist, as a young boy, is obsessed with nuclear Armageddon and builds a fall-out shelter in the family basement using a ping-pong table. His father comes down into the basement one night and talks the boy through his fear, and they dismantle the makeshift fall-out shelter in a ceremony that ends with them playing ping-pong.
What do You think about The Nuclear Age (1996)?
Ce livre raconte de manière humoristique la vie d'un homme paranoïaque dont la plus grande peur est une guerre nucléaire. L'auteur remonte jusqu'à la jeunesse du personnage en passant par son adolescence solitaire et sa fuite pour échapper à la guerre du Viet-Nam.J'ai adoré la première moitié du roman mais je me suis emmerdé durant la seconde moitié. La jeunesse du personnage principal était vraiment bien monté. Ça se gâche lorsqu'il fuit la guerre. J'ai vraiment perdu tout intéret à partir de ce moment.
—Yves
This book was a random pull off the Border's shelf and it turned out to be a pretty good pick. At first I didn't think I would like it because the story seemed like it wasn't going to go anywhere. The first chapter starts out in present time and the main character is digging a hole in his backyard to protect his family from imminent nuclear war -- he is pretty crazy. Most of the novel is a recount of his life after he dodged the draft with his buddies and fellow “terrorists”. One of his buddies is a girl that fawns over him through the whole book, which is a frustrating story line in itself. The most interesting part of the book for me was the present day time period where he digs this huge hole while his wife and daughter think he is insane – he does some seriously crazy things that had me very interested.
—Jessica
Yet another great book by tim o'brien, about people messed up by Vietnam. In this one however, the main character is pretty nuts before Vietnam, but the war certainly doesn't help anything. The main character is strange and pretty hard to relate to, but once you get used to his neuroses he becomes pretty funny. This is the story of a guy in Montana who goes nuts because he is terrified of bombs and decides to dig a fall out shelter in his back yard. His wife gets pissed and stops talking to him and his 10 year old daughter doesn't know what is wrong with her dad or what is going to happen to their family. That only accounts for maybe 20% of the book. Most of it deal with the main character growing up and how these fears drove his life, and what happened during Nam and his love life.
—Matt
