Home as the territory of certainty: more notes on Kevin Power's "The Yellow Birds"

Private Bartle, the protagonist of Kevin Power's The Yellow Birds, returns from Iraq having lost his faith. Not his faith in God or any particular religion, but the belief that the world makes sense, observes an order, has a meaning we might get at. He says, "At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance. Order became an accident of observation"(32-33).  He and his fellow soldiers spend a lot of time trying to look at he carnage around them and to draw sense and comfort from it. When a comrade dies, they see it as confirmation that they are less likely to. They imagine they are too small and insignificant to get killed. In hindsight, with a costly wisdom, Bartle realizes, "we were wrong. Our biggest error was thinking that it mattered what we thought"(13). Visiting a cathedral in Germany on his way back, he thinks he "could have picked up a handful of dirt from the street outsie, some wax from a candle on the alterpiece, ash from the incense as it swung past. I could have wrung it out, hoping I might find an essential thing that would give meaning to this place or that time. I did not. Certainty had surrendered all its territory in my mind"(60).

As Bartle is flying back to Richmond, from his one year tour, he has a moment where a thought slowly crawls across that attention of his consciousness. He begins to think, 'I want to go.....,' but he can't complete the thought for a moment. Only after a few seconds does the word "home" cross his mind. Although he doesn't quite know consciously what to make of this funny delay in the expression of his desire, it points to the fact that Bartle will have a hard, maybe impossible, time coming home. It doesn't exist as it did.

Home is a place of certainty. It is a center that lends you all your frames of references. It is where you have family and friends who love you and lend you a sense of your own significance. You matter because you matter to your loved ones, all the people back home. But, if the idea of certainty and significance have been blown away, torn from one like a limb, it is also hard to re-establish the authenticity, or truth, of home.

Bartle certainly doesn't feel it. At some point, in Iraq, he has lost his faith and his feeling of home. He can no longer imagine himself at home as he was. As he and his mother cross the James on a bridge into Richmond, he doesn't recall how he spent his youthful days on the river but instead sees himself as a soldier and imagines how he would navigate along its shore in the face of a hostile enemy. When he finally enters the room he grew up in, he's afraid to remove his army gear. As he removes it piece by piece, he fears "disappearing." He adjust slowly to being home. He stands in his room and is surrounded by a world of familiar smells and sounds but now "it was all filler. The noise, the  sound, they existed  just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home"(111). 

Land of the Brave: Bravery in Powers The Yellow Birds and Tim O'Brien's If I Die

In the past week or so I've been reading Kevin Power's The Yellow Birds, a novel offering a private's experience of the Iraq War and Tim O'Brien's memoir of his time serving in the infantry in Vietnam.
The two perspectives differ greatly on the whole idea of bravery.

Inspired by a brave platoon leader, O'Brien is very interested in the idea and spends a good portion of a chapter trying to define the concept. He even draws in Plato to suggest that bravery is not simply courage in the face of danger. It requires that one show courage in the face of danger for the purposes of trying to accomplish something good or just. Moreover, it can't be courage born of ignorance; the brave person must be fully aware of the dangers and risks he's facing down. Anything short of this is a questionable bravery.

O'Brien finds that bravery in Vietnam was rare simply because so many soldiers practiced various types of blinkering or ignorance. He's not faulting them for it, but according to O'Brien, "When we walked through the sultry villes and sluggish sullen land...the mass of men...talked little about dying...Death was taboo...Fear was taboo. It could be mentioned, of course, but it had to be accompanied with a shrug and a grin and obvious resignation. All this took the meaning out of courage."

Later, he revises this assessment and suggest that the average man sometimes acts bravely and at other times acts cowardly depending on the circumstances. He concludes, "the men who do well on average, perhaps with one moment of glory, those men are brave." Still, he singles out his brave platoon leader, Johansen, as demonstrating an exalted form of courage and this demonstration of courage redeemed the war and gave him something to fight for, to strive for.

Power's Private Bartle is much less interested in bravery, as either an idea or a redeeming goal. He too is intrigued by a brave commander, Lieutenant Sterling, who is a combat-hardened soldier's soldier that Bartle admires and fears. Bartle says, "I wasn't sure he wasn't crazy, but I trusted that he was brave. And I now know the extent of Sterling's bravery. It was narrowly focused, but it was pure and unadulterated. It was a kind of elemental self-sacrifice, free of ideology, free of logic"(43). O'Brien would dismiss this as a sham bravery, but Bartle is fascinated by it. Ultimately, Sterling proves to be crazy and brutal and this leads Bartle and the reader to question the idea of bravery offered in so many war narratives.

Telling war stories: thinking about Kevin Power's "The Yellow Birds" and Tim O'Brien's "If I Die in a Combat Zone"

After finishing Kevin Power's novel set in the Iraq war,The Yellow Birds, I recalled having bought and never read Tim O'Brien's memoir of combat in Vietnam, If I Die In a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. Maybe it was that both use Army drill songs for titles that drew me to recall and pick up O'Brien's book. I don't know. But, I decided to read O'Brien's memoir in the hopes of better understanding Power's novel.

The two books converse with each other. While nominally a novel, Power's book has a whiff of memoir about it. The author bio on the jacket informs that Powers "served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar." Power's story of the fictional infantry man John Bartle takes place at that time and place. Despite the fact that Powers has clearly not intended this as a memoir, he really does seem to want to offer some kind of witness to his experience. Or, to offer Bartle as an unwilling witness forced to tell a story he'd rather not tell. 

Both soldiers are careful to hedge their stories with caveats and warnings. O'Brien confesses, "I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows,  from one who's been there and come back," but he realize that to draw this or any other such large lesson from the war is not "right." He writes, "Now, war ended, all I'm left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth" and ends asking: "Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?"(31).

Power's Bartle too is unable to draw pattern or meaning from his experience.  Imprisoned after the war for crimes committed during it, he marks his cell walls everytime he remembers an incident from the war,  "thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks into a story that made sense." Later, he realizes "the marks could not be assembled into any kind of pattern. They were fixed in place. Connecting them would be wrong. They fell where they had fallen"(216-217).

Bartle is not a young man prone to reflection or philosophy. He seems to be telling his story only to himself. On the other hand, O'Brien is clearly writing a book as a witness to what he saw as a combat soldier during his year long stint in Vietnam in 1969. In distinction to Bartle, both before and during his year of war, the young O'Brien is obsessed with the justice of his war, why he is there and should he be there. He spends a great deal of time trying to define courage and whether he displays it.

But, like Bartle, O'Brien seems reluctant to see pattern and meaning in his war experience. His experience leads him to suspect that only people who have never experienced war look for meaning there. Bartle is truly adverse to drawing meaning from his time in Iraq; O'Brien claims to feel the same but he is much more apt to occasionally try to draw some redeeming value from his time in Vietnam.

He modestly and maybe disingenously offers his book as something far less. He asks, "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories." As both books make clear, war stories tell truths that call into question the very idea of truth.

Anita Desai's The Artist of Disappearance

I've been reading and re-reading Anita Desai's trio of novellas, The Artist of Disappearance all summer and now into the fall. I've read them distractedly on a train, between tours while volunteering as docent at local historic homes, while waiting for my oil to be changed. I've never been able to read any of these novellas straight through, in one sitting. They are not exactly page-turners. But, strangely enough, they stick with you and I find myself thinking about them when I go out and walk or while sitting at a light.

They are all sad stories about creating and beauty. Coming as they do at the end of Desai's long and distinguished career as a writer, they have a special heft and poignancy.

Tonight's post is on the first story in the collection, The Museum of Final Journeys which features a nameless and unremarkable narrator, a petty and mean-spirited young man who has taken up a minor government post in the remotes of modern India. He is bored and lonely and his unhappiness gets spent on contempt for the poor locals whom he serves as judge and record keeper. His father and Uncles had regaled him with adventure stories of their own time as government officials in the provinces, but he finds his own experience to be something else entirely. Then, at the point of apathy, he hears of a mythic museum on one of the local plantations, and, shortly after, an elderly, obsequious man, whom the narrator describes as a "clerical creature," appears at his gate seeking help for a large, mysterious museum.

The clerical creature's request comes wrapped in a story that the official finds long. As his ancestors before him, the clerical creature (hereafter the clerk) has worked all of his life as the caretaker of a large plantation that has been falling apart over the years and now is nearly in ruins. At one point, in hopes of averting catastrophe, the master of the plantation married a rich, cultured young bride. They have a child together but the master dies shortly after the child is born.

The clerical creature assumed the responsibility for the young widow and for making sure the prized child, the heir, has everything. Yet, while the child grows, the estate continues to decline. Although money is hard to come by, the mother and the caretaker work to supply the needs and wants of the beloved child. Eventually, the child grows up, goes off to school in England, earns a degree in law. Everyone expects the beloved child will return and restore the glory of the estate. But, after returning for a short stint, he leaves his heartbroken mother and the caretaker behind and heads out for points unknown never to return.

Not that he doesn't think of home. Shortly after leaving, the son begins to send crates back home with all kinds of beautiful and exotic objects. He continues the practice for years, and the objects start to really accumulate.  Nobody quite knows what to make or do with these objects. Eventually, the mother and caretaker decide to build a museum to house them and the museum grows into a substantial and much talked about collection. At this point, the government official asks if he can see the collection and the caretaker tells him that nothing would make him happier. He has come to the official in hopes that he can enlist the power and wealth of the estate to preserve and secure the museum.

There is a lot of mystery surrounding the whole affair. The official can never quite determine what's happened to the son or the mother. Eventually, intrigued, the official agrees to visit the museum.

The museum proves to be worth the trip. It is truly an astounding collection of objects from every corner of the globe. The clerk takes the official through room after room of amazing objects; rooms filled with miniatures, rooms of kimonos and fans, rooms full of fine rugs, masks, footwear. The official marvels at it all, and asks "What kind of traveller had this been who desired and acquired the stuff of other people's lands and lives? Why did he?"

The official's amazement and curiosity soon turns to anxiety. It's all a bit overwhelming.The objects seem pitiful; full of craft and expression, they remain disquietingly mute. Outside their home and time, one would need to bring knowledge to get them to speak. And, each comes from a particular, distinct time and place. The collection seems less an assemblage of objects that communicate beauty and emotion and more a serious of things making impossible and insistent demands.

The official fears that if he takes on the challenge of preserving this collection, his life will be that of a grave-keeper. He notes "whole worlds were encrypted here and I looked to my guide for elucidation but he only gave a slight shrug as if to say: what does it matter? The young master collected them and that was what made them precious." The official realizes he's being enlisted in a futile effort to keep alive a memory.

We never do find out why the young master left never to return; it's not even clear whether the clerk, despite his long service and deep attachment to the family knows why he left to never return. Nor do we ever find out exactly how the mother explains her son's abandonment. We never know to what extent the objects come to take his place. It is a place that is never filled. We do learn that the mother has left the estate for good herself, leaving it and the museum in the hands of the caretaker. But, we don't know if this move was precipitated by resignation or simply by old age. Did the mother eventually realize that the objects can't cover the loss of her son? We do realize that the caretaker has not resigned himself to the son's having left. If he's not exactly expecting him home, he still can't give up on the idea. In a way, caring for the objects comes to replace caring for the son and family. But, he can't do it alone, and the official isn't interested in helping him in his quixotic quest.

"Something Happened": The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Writing this piece about Kevin Powers novel The Yellow Birds, I realized that I didn't know the first name of the narrator and center of the book, Private Bartle. I don't think that's because Power necessarily intended Bartle as an everyman. In fact, Private Bartle would be offended by such meaning-making gestures, or attempts at propaganda. Private Bartle's narration is an act of witness, told after the fact, after his time in Iraq. Something has happened, but Bartle needs to...get to that in the right way. Bartle's story isn't intended or presented as a lesson, or to make a point. And, that might be the beginning of a peace.

John Bartle (first mention of that name comes on page 44) almost seems to wander into the war; or, maybe he's wandering when it stalks him. He begins his story by telling of how "the war tried to kill us in the spring. ....While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dar. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."

Bartle is a twenty-one year old at the start of his memory. Dominated by the war, all of his memories seems to begin in 2003.  At this point, he's been in the army two years and is Fort Dix waiting to be deployed to Iraq. At Dix, he meets Daniel Murphy, an eighteen year old raw recruit whom he adopts. When he meets Murphy, Bartle thinks about what he'll say about himself and finds a disquieting blank. He thinks," I'd been in the army a couple of years. It had been good to me, more or less, a place to disappear. I kept my head down and did as i was told. Nobody expected much of me, and I hadn't asked for much in return." Bartle likes the army because it has conferred a type of freedom upon him. Soon after enlisting, he realizes, "never have to make a decision again."

Of course, this doesn't prove true entirely or how to explain his friendship with Murphy. In his telling, in his memory, Bartle downplays his part in that. He downplays his part in much of what happens. As Bartle recalls, one day at Dix, Murphy simply appeared next to him in formation, says hello and Bartle gets chewed out for talking out of turn. Capping off his account of their first meeting, Bartle summarizes, There is nothing else to be said. Something happened. I meet Murph."

Murphy as infantryman is a bit over-his-head. His and Bartle's seargent, Sterling, basically asks Bartle to keep an eye on him. Without really making a real conscious decision, Bartle agrees. He further cements his bond to the slightly spacey eighteen year old from rural Virginia when he promises his mother, LaDonna Murphy, that he'll look after her son. He tells her, "'Of course,'" while thinking "Sure, sure...Now you reassure me and I'll go back and go to bed." This promiseso casually entered proves to change him dramatically.

Bartle proves incapable of helping Murphy, incapable of figuring out how he was supposed to, and incapable of forgetting Murphy or forgiving himself. Murphy's death forces him to recall the war in an obsessive way and yet he is never able to gain any answers or perspective. By the end, this almost seems an act of memory pursued to destroy the notion of answers and patterns, to mock the idea of certainty as the refuge of people who have never experienced a war, nor seen the worst of man.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

After a terrible epidemic basically wipes out human-kind in North America, two men, Hig and Bangley, forge a hardscrabble existence at a county airport in the shadow of the Rockies in Peter Heller's first novel, The Dog Stars.

An odd couple drawn together for safety and by circumstance, Hig and Bangley spend most of their days securing their turf, patrolling their perimeter from, as Hig with understatement puts it, "intruders." Hig and Bangley are a team; Hig does most the recon, Bangley does most of the killiing. Hig does his his recon flying a 1956 Cessna 182, which he calls the beast, over about a thirty square mile tract.  Bangley does his part using the veritable arsenal of weapons which he came with. When, he showed up out of the blue one day in an old truck.Hig is our narrator, or journaler, and supplies precious little in the way of background on either himself or Bangley. Heller is after a ground-zero situation.

The intruders who come to Hig and Bangley's doorsetp are desperate, fierce and scary people who seem intent on killing and taking. After the contagion, civilization has all but collapsed and mankind has returned to a primitive, every man for himself state.  Of course, in all cases, neither the reader nor Hig can be sure of the intruders intentions or whether they are uniformily predatory. When others intrude on the little homestead Hig and Bangley have established,  Bangley, ("a mean gun nut" according to Hig) ensures that he and Hig shoot first and never ask any questions later. Although, homestead might be the wrong word. Hig sleeps outside a house, under the stars, claiming not to want to be trapped by a likely target for marauders. Hig has doubts but never lets those get in the way of the killing, in part because he's afraid he might be next if he were to argue for practicing a bit more discrimination.

The marauders who come are equal parts pathetic and frightening. There is "a young girl, a scarecrow" with a pocketknife who tries to ambush him from behind only to be mowed down by Bangley. There are scary bands of primitively armed men, anywhere from six to eight, usually large and fierce. Think pirates. These bands would potentially present problems if any were ever as well-armed as Bangley. This is definitely a book that the NRA will love.

Hig and Bangley's relationship is a strained one. Misanthropic Bangley seems to relish the killing. Its almost as if this bleak, isolated and red-in-tooth and claw world is a dream set-up for him. Hig on the other hand is less well adjusted to his existence and still feels some need to exercise his  humanity. Every once in a while, initially unbeknownst to Bangley, he makes calls on a large Mennonite family ten miles south of them. The family is suffering from "the blood," a blood disease that arose in response to the flu that annihilated the vast majority of people.

When Bangley finds out that Hig is doing this, he argues, "you want to get this far and die of the blood?" Beginning to question his survivor's good fortune, Hig thinks "This Far. Bangley and Jasper [Hig's dog] and a low fat diet."

Heller's novel is a philosophical one, begging several questions the question; what makes life worth-living? Can you imagine a case when too much would be taken away? What would be that case? How does one go forward after disasters that seem to strip all worth away?

As the book begins, Hig has been eking it out with Bangley at the airport for almost nine years. His daily routine seems to require a great deal of mental and emotional effort. Memory can't be indulged; for the most part, Hig avoids thinking about his comfortable life before the plague and the wife and child-to-be he lost in it. Occasionally, he goes off with Jasper and hunts and fishes, although much of the game is gone. The beauty he sees in nature now only confuses him in the face of all the senseless disaster he's lived through. He asks Bangley, "if he ever thought there was anything more than this, than just surviving day to day. Recon, fixing the plane, growing the five vegetables, trapping a rabbit. Like what are we waiting for?"

Yet, he persists, going forward powered by a slender hope. At one point, he asks himself, "Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn't come for months?" He's assumed a posture of hope in the hopes it will create a bit of magic.

Waiting with hope eventually wears then and he decides a desperate acts is in order. Spurred by a mysterious radio signal he received from Grand Junction three years before, he decides to get in his plane and fly there, despite the fact that he's not sure what he'll find or whether he'll find gas he can use to fly back to Bangley and his "home." He needs more and he's willing to risk all to find it.

Predictably and improbably, he finds a woman, Cima. And, of course, she's not only sane, but sweet, smart and fantastic looking. He also discovers where the call from Grand Junction came from, but what was a source of hope proves to have sprung from something considerably bleaker. But, all this is the rest of the story, and I won't spoil it.  Regarding the probability of there being a lovely, sane, smart women wandering out in the wasteland....maybe I just don't recognize the possibilities that lie in even the bleakest situations.

The opening of the book is better than the questing journey outward that dominates it's close. The way the two men craft a life and manufacture a reason for being out of the thinnest air is fascinating. The rest of the story seems contrived. Heller creates a situation that poses some really interesting questions, he puts his characters in a box, but then takes the easy way out and gives them an unrealistic way out. I'll leave it there to spare those who might want to read the book.

It's a page-turner. For the most part, Heller writes in a spare, elliptical style. As a character, Hig is a bit of a mess; he's gone through hell and back but is still, at heart, an all-American dude. He is sensitive, attuned to nature, super-handy, a great outdoorsman. He is also literary: when he makes one final trip to the house he'd shared with Melissa, it's to retrieve a volume of William Stafford poems. He's great company, but sometimes he doesn't convince or add up. He tends to gush at points, and some of his thoughts seem kind of like FB posts, self-involved recitations of likes and dislikes. He seems to sometimes veer suddenly between the macho and the maudlin

Still, the book asks the big questions and begins to answer some of them. What are our reason for being? How resilient are they? And, the book presents a welcome view of nature as an ambivalent force. Hig is clearly enamored by the outdoors, but can he see it quite the same way after nature, in the form of a bug, basically strips him of all he possesses? I wish Heller had delved into this area a bit more. And, if nothing else, the death of Jasper the dog will strike a chord with any animal lover.

Hanna Pylvainen's We Sinners

Aiming to convince her to leave her church, Tiina Rovaniemi's boyfriend Matthew tells her "You know, the best thing about the church is your family, and the worst thing about our family is the church"(102). While Tiina easily recognizes the truth of Matthew's words, she also realizes it will never be simple for her to separate the two.

The confluence of faith and family is at heart of Hanna Pylvainen's, We Sinners. The eleven short stories in the collection tell of Tiina's family, the Finnish-American Rovaniemi clan, made up of her, her mom and dad and eight siblings. Eleven stories, eleven members, although not every member narrates a story.

The Rovaniemi's are Laestadians, members of the Laestadian church. As rebellious daughter Uppu explains to a boyfriend, "It's a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans"(154). It is a strict church in some regards; drinking, dancing, movies, popular movies, TV are all heavilly frowned upon. As is any type of birth-control; the Rovaniemi's are a large family and the married children who remain in the church also launch large families. Yet, according to the head of the clan, Warren Rovaniemi, who ministers at the church on weekends while pulling down a check as an accountant to earn a living, "Once you had the heart of a believer...the restrictions weren't restrictions at all- it was simply what your conscience told you to do and not to do"(158). Beyond this, Laestadianism is a church built upon forgiveness. It recognizes man is a sinner and the core of it's service is to foster forgiveness.

The Rovaniemi's simple faith offers peace and forgiveness, and builds remarkable characters. It cements them as a family. Yet, for all it's strengths and simple beauties, it is a severe faith. It is a faith, and, by it's nature, everyone struggle with it.

It seems especially a challenge for the children growing up in a late 20th century suburb of Detroit. For one, the rules of the church make them lead quite different lives from those of their peers. Nobody they know has such a large family. Nobody they know is forbidden from going to the movies. They all feel an urge to escape both at times. And, doubt creeps into the faith of all.

However, escape is not an easy passage, and although yearned for at times, when it comes to the point, it is hard to make the leap away from faith. When his wife asks what he does all day at work as an accountant, Warren Rovaniemi glibly tells her "I figure out the difference between what things seem to cost and what things really cost"(30). The Rovaniemi children all fear what leaving the church will really cost.

How does one price the gift of forgiveness and love. The family practices an imperfect but sincere and beautiful love founded on a daily, constant, seeking and granting of forgiveness. The mother, Pirjo Rovaniemi, tells one of her seven daughters' suitors, Jonas Chan, that her children "are the best of me...They are the best thing I ever did with my life"(171). And, the children feel the love and practice between themselves seeking and granting forgiveness. The family knits its members into something both maddening and large, alive and vibrant. When the Rovaniemi's leave Jonas Chan's high school graduation party, "they left behind a backyard of quiet that no one could fill again. He felt it again, the largeness of them, at Uppu's graduation, though then the entire churh showed, every room filled, even the stairs, even the porch, forty or fifty little kids running about, a few babies lying on blankets atop the living room rug, waiving their limbs like beetles on their backs"(167).

The situation is not easy. All the members of the family have doubts. When Warren suspects he is going to be chosen to minister to the congregation, he quickly dismisses his suspicions; surely, God knowing him as the particularly wrathful and  sinful creature he knows himself, He will never allow such a thing to happen. It does, although Pylvainen never makes us privy to the internal doubts such a series of events must have occasioned. Several of the siblings leave the church, unable to sustain the faith and not willing to fake it, despite the fact that it creates a barrier between themselves and their believing kin. Their honesty speaks to their respect for the faith of their family. Even the most devout member of the siblings, Brita is subject to a particulary dark night in her soul when she nearly dies after delivering her last child. Nobody simply leaves.

Never simply preaching one way or another, Pylvainen has done a superb and nuanced job of capturing the strengths and weaknesses of living a strict, non-mainstream faith. This is far from a screed opposed. If anything, it leaves me, a struggling believer who grew up in a rather normal, small nuclear household, envious of the Rovaniemi children. Their family and faith has offered them a certainty and happiness that is lacking for many. When son Nels experiments with alcohol in college, he eventually has a moment when he pulls back and realizes he is about to lose something if he continues to indulge in such sinful behavior. Nels "sat in the back of the lecture hall and wondered about all the people sitting there, bored, trying to figure out who they had a chance with. He felt bad for them, for the limits of their experiences, for the fragility and infrequency of their happiness. They did not even known, he thought, the kind of happiness they wanted"(74).