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Lizzie's War by Tim Farrington HarperSanFrancisco, 2005 384 pp., $24.95 
The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin Knopf, 2005 304 pp., $22.95, paper |
I like Tim Farrington's new novel, Lizzie's War, but not because its Vietnam-era story is unique or surprising. Those were turbulent times, and turbulent times catch up writers in their wake. Many novelists have now written about the struggles of soldiers in an unpopular, possibly unjust, war. What makes Lizzie's War distinctive is the way it treats the battlefield and the homefront as parallel and equal fields of conflict. A soldier's bitter struggles are no less grueling than his wife's struggles at home. Eventually the marriage itself becomes a third battlefield, where husband and wife have to fight their way through years of distance and resentment in order to save their union.
Farrington paints an emotional picture of the O'Reillys, a Marine family so absurdly loyal that they celebrate the anniversary of the Marine Corps' founding every year with a green cake and a blaze of candles. Captain Mike O'Reilly is in Vietnam, leading his first solo company through some of the worst combat of the war so far. His son Danny knows Corps lore backward and forward and imagines battle in a glow of glory. For Danny's mother, though, war is a rival, a cruel mistress that claims her husband, body and soul. What Liz O'Reilly fears most in life is a knock on the door, Marines in dress greens on the front step, waiting to tell her that Mike is dead or wounded. She's always listening, always clinging to the edge of the normal and familiar.
On the other side of the world, Mike sees all the war's absurdities: men dying because of bad decisions, hard-won victories negated by politics. Yet he knows that it's his calling to lead men into battle, and he knows he's good at it. How can he put his true thoughts into words in a letter home? How can he sum up the horror of war and his own mixed feelings without distressing his wife? He chooses to shield her from the truth, writing breezy letters that downplay the danger he's in. To Liz, Mike's letters become tokens of his infidelity.
The tables turn, though, when Liz finds herself in a parallel battle that she can't share with Mike any more than he can share the war with her. Doctors tell her that the child she's carrying won't come to term. She decides to continue with the pregnancy anyway, but eventually gives birth to a daughter who only lives a little while. Without Mike there to support her, Liz depends on the comfort of a young priest, Father Germaine, another Vietnam vet with his own share of cruel memories. Germaine wants to love Liz but has to be content to do the work of God, giving last rites to Liz's child and taking her older children under his wing.
A photograph of his own dying daughter in a young priest's arms leaves Mike both anguished and jealous. It turns out that the hardest loss of all is the one he's not there to share. And when he finally comes home, he still has a long way to travel into his wife's heart. Sitting on a calm beach, Mike and Liz turn from their separate battles and face each other in battle posture, Mike protecting himself, Liz becoming the aggressor. She finds a new scar on his leg (one of many) and feels a flash of rage:
Her husband's damaged body shocked her still—this changed, scourged, compromised thing he had brought home to her, flesh of her flesh. She had a sense of ongoing violation and even, strangely, of jealousy, at his wounds, at the violent intimacies of them, in which she had played no part.
She thinks of Mike's refusal to talk about the war, she thinks of their dead daughter, and then she bares her anger (and fingernails) and gives him a wound of her own. "I want to hear the truth," she says while he examines his bloody leg in awe. "That's the point. I just want to hear the truth."
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