The Iraq War seemed from the outset a poor candidate to produce lasting works of literature. There was no meaningful discussion beforehand of the rationale for intervention to remove Saddam Hussein, and the war unfolded with predictable Sisyphean senselessness. The U.S. public was bombarded with too much information on specific battles or strategies and too little insight into the larger picture of what was taking place and why. Surprisingly enough, a growing library of books inspired by that war has started to add up to a useful corrective to that void. Now that we’ve reached a certain historical distance from the start of the war in 2003, and a strong lineup of nonfiction chroniclers has checked in with useful studies, the way is open for novelists looking to put a more personal stamp on coming to terms with the war and attempting the seemingly impossible feat of steering us toward something like a feeling of closure.
Nicholas Kulish, a war correspondent, checked in early with Last One In, an Evelyn Waugh-influenced send up of the farcical nature of the war. By 2012 Iraq War novels like The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers were veering in colorfully different directions and now, with Matt Gallagher’s recently published novel Youngblood, there is finally a sense of a critical mass of worthy fiction to give any reader food for thought. Gallagher served as an Army Captain in Iraq and wrote a popular blog about his experiences there until it was shut down by the U.S. government in June 2008. His first book, the nonfiction Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, was published in March 2010 and summed up by The New York Times as “an immediate account, by turns comic, harrowing and reflective, of a platoon’s deployment in Iraq that grew out of the author’s popular war blog,” but in retrospective seems like a mere warmup for the novel to follow.
Influential Times critic Michiko Kakutani gave Youngblood a rave review. “If the war had a Groundhog Day-like feel to many American soldiers (who had to continually retake the same towns and streets from insurgents they had fought only months before), the Iraqis were even more aware of the Sisyphean nature of the endless conflict and bloodshed — losing loved ones in escalating clashes between Sunnis and Shiites, and deprived of essential services like electricity and clean water, and any sense of safety,” she wrote. “In fact, the most powerful scenes in this novel provide a sad understanding of the fallout that the war had on ordinary Iraqis, reminiscent of Anthony Shadid’s harrowing 2005 nonfiction book, Night Draws Near. Youngblood reads like several stories at once. It’s a bildungsroman about a young lieutenant named Jack Porter trying to live up to his older brother’s heroics and learning what it means to lead a platoon under combat conditions. It’s a detective story about Jack’s efforts to investigate dark rumors about the past conduct of a bellicose sergeant named Chambers, whom Jack worries will get his own platoon into trouble by ‘tweaking the rules of engagement.’ And it’s a love story about a missing American soldier named Rios, who fell in love with a prominent sheikh’s daughter, Rana, whom Jack will meet and also come to care for.”
The Wellstone Center in the Redwoods: What was it like growing up in Reno, a place that could not be much more different than that other famous Nevada casino town, Las Vegas?
Gallagher: The Reno I remember isn’t the Reno held in popular imagination. My family lived in the suburbs, and we’d spend our Friday evenings at Barnes & Noble, our weekends playing basketball in backyards or swimming up at Tahoe. It was like a lot of places out west, I think, very peaceful, very open. Though my dad worked as an attorney for one of the casinos, we didn’t really spend much time downtown. Then again, one of my first jobs was working at a casino pool. That was different, though I didn’t know it at the time.
WCR: Do you have early recollections of reading or being read to, or favorite books from early childhood?
Gallagher: I’m told I forced my parents to read The Story of Ferdinand to me a few thousand times. Looking back on it, it probably shaped my worldview and politics in a variety of lasting ways. Go Dog, Go and Johnny Tremain were also favorites from those years.
WCR: Were there particular books or authors that helped kindle in you an early desire to be a writer?
Gallagher: My mom was and is a voracious reader, and the library was always the biggest room in our house. An early-ish memory of my mom as a person (as opposed to just being my mom) was a letter exchange she had with Tom Wolfe about A Man in Full. She loved Wolfe’s work, but as a native Virginian, she objected to the way he portrayed a Southern woman (or Southern women, plural) in that novel. She wrote his publishing house about it, mostly as an exercise. But he wrote her back, politely and thoughtfully. The whole thing seemed so cool to me, both that she felt compelled to voice her opinion and did so, and then that this famous author in the white suit who lived in New York would take the time to write back a suburban lawyer living in Reno.
Then there was the work of Joan Didion and Katherine Anne Porter – both western writers, both independent minds and spirits. And Hemingway, of course. I recently wrote an essay for The Paris Review about his effect on me as a person and as a writer, both the positive and the negative.
WCR: What were you like at Bishop Manogue, your high school? You ran cross country and track, did you play any other sports there? Care to name a teacher or two or three who had a major influence on you?
Gallagher: Oh, I imagine I was like a lot of bookish young people trying to find their way – goofy and earnest, all at once, and blissfully unaware of the wider world beyond his own ruminations. I loved running the mile and two-mile, for that reason – enough time to escape into your own world, but not so long it became masochistic. I was also on the JV football team for two years (to describe myself as a “player” would’ve required actually playing in games), which was both humiliating and educational. I loved football. I was also ninety pounds, dripping wet. I failed at it, over and over again. Great training for writing, in a way. I edited the school newspaper and was on the school’s academic team. It took me a few years, but I learned to embrace that side of my being by the end of high school. “Nerds inherit the earth!” my mom always said, and she was right about that (and, well, pretty much everything else. Moms always are.).
Among many other educators who I’m greatly indebted to: Loni Byloff at Brookfield elementary, and Shelly Brewster, Hardy McNew, and Maureen O’Mara at Bishop Manogue. The first three for teaching me to love Tolkien, Fitzgerald and Shakespeare, respectively, the last for somehow getting my SAT Math score up to snuff.
WCR: Tell us more about how Shelly Brewster turned you on to Fitzgerald. Which books did you read? What did she do to help you connect with the writing? And the same please for Hardy McNew with Shakespeare.
Gallagher: Well, we started with The Great Gatsby, of course. Even then, the novel felt so quintessentially American – and Fitzgerald’s writing is so smooth, so evocative. I’d never read anything like that before. It wasn’t long before I found my way to his short stories and This Side of Paradise and Tender is the Night. Ms. Brewster didn’t just have us read the books, though, and answer questions to prove we understood basic plot points and textual context. She let us wrestle over the writing, over the characters and their lives. I’m still deeply appreciative she gave us that freedom. That doesn’t happen in many eleventh-grade classrooms, unfortunately.
As for Shakespeare, Othello and Macbeth were the first plays I remember finishing and thinking, “Okay, this is why this dead dude still gets talked about all these centuries later.” Once I got to Hamlet and Merchant of Venice, I was hooked. It wasn’t just Shakespeare’s writing, or his storytelling. It was how he used both to amplify the other.
WCR: You’ve written about going back and reading Hemingway novels again, years after you first read them, and seeing the books quite differently. Are there other examples from the last year of going back and reading books again and having them seem different?
Gallagher: I made the mistake of trying to read A Catcher in the Rye again a couple years ago. I was too old; the magic of Holden had been lost to time, even as I better appreciated Salinger’s mastery. Vonnegut always holds up, in my experience. Same with Didion and Conrad. For years and years, I tried and failed to get through Moby Dick – then, on our honeymoon to Greece a few years back, I blew through it, savoring every word. (Well, perhaps not the chapter devoted entirely to whaling’s intricacies …) I don’t enjoy Bukowski as much as I did a decade ago. Same with late-career Joyce. On the other hand, I savor early-career Joyce even more now. Same with Virginia Woolf – I think I had to grow into her work.
WCR: Tolstoy is like that, too – it takes time to grow into his work. You wrote a history thesis at Wake Forest on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which served in the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in part inspired your interest. Did you read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia as well? Is Orwell a writer you’ve come to respect more over the years?
Gallagher: Homage to Catalonia is top-shelf, and I mean that literally – it’s between Tolstoy and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk at Casa del Gallagher. And yes, Orwell is definitely a writer I’ve long respected and continue to admire – for his prescience, for his dedication to living his ideals, for his clear eyes and truthful spirit. He might not have been a foremost stylist, but so what? “The wintry conscience of a generation” had bigger and more pressing matters to tend to. His essay “Shooting an Elephant” affected every single page of my novel. A brilliant and multi-layered essay, I could care less if some literary historians think Orwell made the whole thing up. The emotional truth of it is what resonates all these decades later.
WCR: At what point did you start reading a lot of books about the U.S. experience in Vietnam? Was it shortly before you deployed as part of the surge, or earlier? What Tim O’Brien books stand out for you as resonating the most for you personally, and are his books your favorite U.S. novels on the Iraq War, or do others get the nod there? Also have you read Dispatches by Michael Herr and The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh?
Gallagher: High school, as best as I can recollect. Started with “The Things They Carried” and down the rabbit hole I went. There was something so dark and transfixing about the Vietnam literature canon – it defied the “America Saves Democracy” narrative from World War II with power and righteous anger. I came to Dispatches later, in college – god, that book. It changed the way my brain interacted with language. Then there’s Jim Webb’s Fields of Fire, Bobbi Ann Mason’s In Country, O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Greene’s The Quiet American, Didion’s Democracy, among many others. More recently written books, like Marlantes’ Matterhorn and Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, have added even more depth and perspective to that awful conflict and deep schism across American society. I didn’t read The Sorrow of War until I was in the Army, actually, though before we deployed to Iraq. In a way, it was the healthiest thing to do before going to war as a young person, to realize and remember the “others” aren’t others at all, but fierce, silly young people, too, just like we were.
WCR: Tell us the back story of the origins of the work that became your novel Youngblood? Did you start writing it during your time earning an MFA at Columbia?
Gallagher: I’d just started at Columbia, to better my fiction. I was writing about anything and everything not war or military-related; like a lot of young writers, I didn’t like being categorized or reduced, in this case to being a “war writer,” so I was set on proving I wasn’t. Even got halfway through a draft of a novel about contemporary New York/post-empire America, etc. This was late 2011, the same time American military forces were fully withdrawing from Iraq. For obvious reasons I found myself staying up late into the night watching the news about it. I’d spent a very formative time there, in my youth, with close friends in a tribe of like-minded souls. Damn right I was interested in how the war was “ending,” for the lack of a better word.
Something about those images of the last American Strykers rolling south, down the highway and sand berms into Kuwait, struck something within. For all my efforts to be done with the subject, apparently the subject wasn’t done with me. So I bargained with myself: one short story, set before we’d been in Iraq, during the height of the sectarian wars. A way to try my hand at a ghost story or something, I rationalized. Don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say now that that short story became the bedrock for the novel thesis I focused my MFA time on, which itself eventually became Youngblood. The best laid schemes of mice and men and such.
WCR: What other novels do you recommend that deal with the Iraq War, and what about them stands out for you?
Gallagher: Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a tour de force. Phil Klay is a friend, but I’d recommend his collection Redeployment even if he wasn’t, it’s worthy of the hype. Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds has a real poetic soul, reminiscent of many of the World War I British poetry works. I found Lea Carpenter’s Eleven Days to be a magnificent portrayal of a military mother in this terror wars era … Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone is so smart and elegant and proved to literary readers that this subject could be so much more than American Sniper. There have been a lot of great works of journalism about these wars and their consequences, but the late Jim Frederick set the gold standard with Black Hearts.
Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition made me deeply uncomfortable as an American veteran, which means it was doing something right and doing it well. What else? Roxana Robinson’s Sparta, Katey Schultz’s Flashes of War, Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen – I know I’m missing a ton. Whitney Terrell’s novel The Good Lieutenant is coming out in June and I can’t wait, it sounds fantastic.
WCR: How’s it going on book tour? We know the reviews have been excellent, with Michiko Kakutani speaking for many others; how have individual readers you’ve spoken to face to face been responding to the book? Are you able to have fun and enjoy this? Have you had any encounters, any questions, that have surprised you, in a good way or a not so good way, and has it all been a learning experience for you?
Gallagher: It’s been a ride. You spend years alone with a project, putting everything you have into it, hoping against hope that maybe some people will care when the time comes. So the book landing the way it has … it means so much.
As for readers’ reactions, I’ve been a bit surprised at bookstores how many readers identify with – even like – Chambers. It’s pleasantly surprising, because I wanted Chambers to be nuanced and complex, but I know the stock image of the Tom Berenger-from-Platoon-type is a prominent one in American culture.
WCR: Can writing be taught? Or are the good teachers of writing the ones who understand it’s more a case of encouraging, inspiring and directing, rather than teaching per se?
Gallagher: Can it be taught? Absolutely. Even Shakespeare had to start somewhere. Now the “how” of that teaching is where things can get tricky. Inspiration and direction are part of the education, but not its entirety. What makes up the rest of that entirety, though, is something I’m still trying to figure out, both as an instructor and as a student of craft.
WCR: Have you done any early creative work on a second novel, or are you waiting to get through the rush of events related to publishing “Youngblood” first? Do you think your next book will be fiction or nonfiction?
Gallagher: I’m in the early drafts of a a second novel, one about post-empire America. If Youngblood is written from and about the fringe of that post-empire, this novel will be closer to the center of it, I think. I’d tell you more but honestly, it’s just going to change. The book still needs a lot of work, but I’m excited for its potential.
Archive
The WCR Interview No. 1 – Madison Smartt Bell – July 2015
The WCR Interview No. 2 – Ruth Galm – September 2015
The WCR Interview No. 3 – Deborah Treisman – January 2016