It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid:
short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War - the
subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some
of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and
factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually
has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a
palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt)
correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The
Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he
decided to go: "I would go to war - I would kill and maybe die -
because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so
structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged:
O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war,
and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is
serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book,
hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and
puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for
that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment. (Kirkus
Reviews)
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation
on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of
storytelling. 'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a
sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam
War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a
novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and
theme. But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried',
it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the
human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry
through our lives.
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