Truly as I sat down to write this I got a text from a neighbour and friend who is looking after my garden while I’m away and took out my garbage bins and generally is great for helping give care. These are neighbours who also – thank god – send their children unaccompanied to the park with mine and cultivate the kind of interdependent independence that childhood thrives on – a kind of freedom that parents using GPS tracking watches and hyper-surveillance of children find suspect.
It’s a weird, and very small thread of Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye to attach to, but I was – am – so glad for the way the kids in this book grow up free to roam on bikes and until the streetlights come on and with many, many other children such that they create and cultivate micro communities of relationships. And glad that my kids have tiny opportunities for this, too.
Okay, that’s not really what this book is about and is more about when it is about – following the generation of youth who fight in and live after WWII the book explores how their childhood is shaped by their damaged or absent veteran fathers, then by their own experience fighting, and then watching their own children conscripted for Vietnam. Of course I knew this was a generation that moved through these global conflicts – but following it through the microcosm of two families – two deeply and surprisingly intertwined families – made the permeation of those conflicts into the character of individuals and their world more tangible.
It is also a book about how the mores of the time shaped sexuality and its expression, gender roles, race (ish – this is a rather lightly treated theme and pretty reduced to extremes and headlines) and (barely) class.
These pieces of ‘the times’ also inform how the characters make or don’t make their choices.
[Aside: I got distracted and called away from finishing this post and here it is a month later and I’m doing my best to recall what else I wanted to say about the book But]
One choice – or the same choice made over and over again – centers the book. How a choice for (or against) fidelity to a spouse cascades across a life; how a choice for (or against) the truth (and what exactly is the truth – is it not lying or is it proactive honesty?) explodes relationships and alters lives; how (beyond the individual) choices of global politics made (again and again) find new and familiar patterns.
I enjoyed the book, but if my, now several weeks later impression, holds, its not one that will shatter or shake you. Just a pleasant one for a cottage or a beach or – as the waning days of summer arrive – to read in half hour snippets before collapsing to sleep. Like a well told story of the realist variety where the writing is good but not distractingly good, where the characters are interesting and have an arc but are not people you spend any time outside the book thinking about, and where the plot is one you could describe over the table at a trivia night and everyone would agree that sounds interesting but is not, in the end, that interesting. It is a fine book.
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