America Fantastica by Tim O’Brien
Earlier this month I read Tim O’Brien’s latest book American Fantastica. You may remember Tim O’Brien as the author of The Things They Carried and if you’re an American reader then it’s guaranteed that you were forced to read this novel at some point in high school. Almost 20 years after his last published novel, America Fantastica follows Boyd Halverson, a pathological liar who fell from grace as a famed journalist and is now a JC Penny store manager. Boyd “robs” a bank and takes the bank teller, Annie Bing, as a hostage. The failed bank attempt then leads to a cross country adventure that introduces us to an ensemble of different yet interrelated characters.
With an undercurrent of whimsy and absolute ridiculousness woven throughout the book, it’s clear that Tim O’Brien had fun writing this novel. From the characters he created to the circumstances that he put them in, it’s like he put a bunch of random thoughts into a hat, picked around 20 of them and decided that he was going to run with this and create a book out of it. Surprisingly enough, it worked and everything that happened (e.g., corporate espionage, bank and wire fraud, murder, theft, fake bank robberies, and police corruption) was cohesive and made sense within the context of the story. The writing style however was very dense, but not in an academic sense. Tim O’Brien needed to create a writing style to match this particular world and this called for richer than usual prose. Oh and make sure you have a dictionary nearby when you read this Tim pulled a few words out of the vault that were new even to me, uxorial I’m looking at you.
The best part of this novel is how O’Brien layers in the political and economic realities of 2020. There were mini chapters in the book that played on this phenomenon called mythomania and each section described ludacris situations where individuals came up with outrageous lies that they were thoroughly convinced was real. In turn they would infect those around them to hold the same beliefs so everybody would start lying undermining reality and crafting false narratives. What a way to characterize the end of Trump’s first term as president and the pandemic.
These miniature stories within the overall narrative were an allegory for the fever dream that was 2020. I think this was O’Brien’s way to force us as a country to hold a mirror to our faces and realize how asinine we were behaving during the pandemic and during the months leading up to the 2020 election. Said in another way, the grandfather of American literature was calling us all dumbasses for allowing 2020 to become as ridiculous as it did. Maybe these were his personal reflections of this time and his way of combining the art form that he loves with the harsh reality that we endured.
Some of the more negative parts of the book include slight character fatigue. While there were so many interesting, unique, well thought out characters, towards the end of the book it did feel exhausting. In the remaining quarter of the book he introduced a few new characters and a new side quest. To me this wasn’t necessary since we had already been introduced to so many other people, and it didn’t make any material difference to the overall conclusion of the story. At the end of the day, the rich guy still got away with his crime like we knew he would.
I would recommend America Fantastica as a fun read. It dealt with a lot of heavy real world issues and at times it felt like reliving a past that I thought (and hoped) we left behind. But, Tim O’Brien did an amazing job balancing it with the fictional story of Boyd’s attempt at redemption.
