Double Review: A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors + The Good Soldiers by David Finkel and

Reviewed by Weston Cutter

There’ve been, in history, maybe a dozen great war books—Hedges’s, Tim O’Brien’s early stuff, plus Caputo, Stephen Crane (“Open Boats” has got to be up there on any decent list), maybe Vonnegut, etc. Let’s wildly stretch the imagination and presume that the most valuable and lasting thing that’ll come from the United States’ present involvement in Iraq will in all likelihood be literature: the great books will begin with accounts of the war’s instigation ( Looming Tower) and the actual start of battle ( Generation Kill) and will, presumably, keep going through each of the brutal and bloody years.

Rest assured: no other book on the surge in Iraq will compare with David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers. Here’s why he’s worth talking rapturously about: his book not only does an adroit job with the actual fact-presentation that nonfiction demands (number of soldiers dead, scent of Iraqi air, sensory description of the flashes of light that represent explosions), but his style will knock you down.

Because let’s here acknowledge that, largely, the civilian response to the war in Iraq is a yawn, perhaps followed by an ass scratch. Yes: we all say how critical it is, how unfounded, and we put up our “Send the Soldiers Home” signs in the front yard (or we say how critical it is and mention the Middle East’s future stability and affix bumper stickers onto our vehicles which read “Support Our Troops!”), and we all acknowledge and pay lip service to how essential these ideas are, the ones that are being fought for on our behalf by 19-year-olds half a world away. But does anyone even know how many soldiers have died in Iraq anymore? And don’t bother with how many Iraqis have been killed: we don’t keep track of that (nor, for the record, do we keep track of how many private contractors have been killed).

Which means that along with war itself—one of maybe three or four galvanizing, civilization-defining things—we need to acknowledge that ways of talking about war have been codified. We know this stuff intuitively and we affirm it with rhetoric: WWII was the greatest generation and an entirely noble fight and discussions of the event demand rapturous unironic genuinity (this is a really, really hard position to hold in the face of, say, William Stafford’s real early stuff); Vietnam was a crock, would’ve been “Kennedy’s Mistake” had he not been snipered, and the whole quagmire marked the start of America’s gradual slide from peak greatness, etc.; Guam, Panama, 1980′s Afghanistan vs. Russia—all these skirmishes blend, and it’s hard to imagine anyone under the age of, say, 40 who knows much real detail about those battles.

What’s changed about how we talk about wars and battles is as significant as what’s changed about how those wars and battles are actually fought on the ground. No longer is there a unified citizen response; no longer unified anything. Trace the communicative arc: since at least the 1960s, war has lost its clear-edged and solid-lined power: there’s no more overt good vs. evil, no more black and white. War’s all gray. If you need evidence re: how talking about war has changed, specifically since Iraq, try smirklessly saying WMD, or Shock and Awe, or Mission Accomplished. Just try. And, in another little chicken-vs.-egg schism, any reader’s welcome to ask if, in fact, wars quit being things to believe quite so fervently in as the audacity of the lies told to us by our public officials has risen, or if the lies rose in the wake of the dwindling faith in wars.

Page 40 of The Good Soldiers, the penultimate page of the second chapter: “Where was the bad guy, though? Other than everywhere? Where was the specific one who had set off the IED?…Surely someone in the neighborhood knew who had done this, but how could he persuade them that as damned as they thought they would be for dealing with the Americans, they would be more damned if they did not?” A few paragraphs later: “Off the soldiers went, feet aligned, hands tucked, eyes sweeping, jammers jamming, creeping back to the FOB.”

The Good Soldiers is rife with these moments, times in which American servicemen (they’re all men in this account) deal with near-total chaos, with this Kafka-ish/Heller-ish double-bind by resorting to the stipulated actions and procedures that’ve been laid out for them in manuals and through training. Finkel, in about as generous a move as one could hope for from a writer, offers these moments without commentary, without the slightest editorialized touch, and so the reader’s left feeling much like she did reading Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family—we get something akin to purity.

But that’s not fair to the art Finkel’s achieved: for instance, by coupling scenes of soldiers on the ground with scenes from protests in the United States, or by interspersing frank passages of soldiers confessing massive confusion and despair (“They say on TV that the soldiers want to be here? I can’t speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain’t nobody that wants to be here.”) with scenes of medics trying to save the wounded—these conjunctions are startling and stark and, in ways CNN can only dream of, they deliver on the promise of real-time news in ways I haven’t seen or read elsewhere.

What these conjunctions do is actually deflate, still further, the myth of war. The horrors of mustard gas in WWI started this backlash, started the push away from the view that war is always, completely honorable. No, through Finkel’s astounding book, we’re aware instantly of the artifice of the whole war—not that the whole war’s been a sham, but that war itself is a construct, a myth. There is, in fact, no single “war” even. Finkel’s The Good Soldiers shows all sorts of levels of the war and, through his fine and terrifying details, we’re given a harrowing glimpse of how these multi-valent battles shape up—or, usually, don’t shape up—into the totality of the War in Iraq.

And then there’s America, specifically the United States of. Maybe the ultimate gift and curse postmodernism’s given us is the ability (and, also, the need) to put stuff in air quotes—”art” or “literature” or “democracy” or whatever. Since at least the 1960s, we’ve all come to understand that there are all sorts of ways to parse and examine what “America” might mean—land established by and for pilgrims and religious freedom vs. place of genocidal policies toward Native Americans; land in which everyone’s born with bootstraps with which to pull themselves up vs. as classed a society as any that’s ever existed.

Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors have, with their A New Literary History of America, attempted a fresh examination and compendium of what makes and has made the United States and have seemingly tried to make it as quotation-mark-free a work as possible—this is a post-quotationmark work, which is why reading it is such a interesting and thrilling event.

Here’s Josh Clover, from his chapter on Bob Dylan:

His apotheosis is an index of perhaps the most singular fact concerning “the literary” in the post-World War II era: the accelerating collapse of high and popular art into a seemingly homogeneous sphere of “culture.” And, even more threateningly, the corresponding collapse of that sphere’s distance from the daily life of the market-place, so that those two things—culture and money—seemed to occupy all available space.

Or here’s James Conant on Ralph Waldo Emerson and his 1837 speech to the Phi Betta Kappa society:

Even if someone were somehow to come into the grip of the idea that becoming an intellectual in America meant, above all, learning how to become an American intellectual, there would be few American landmarks by means of which he or she could confidently navigate the way toward such an identity.

Though Conant and Clover are describing events, cultural touchstones separated by a century and a quarter, those two phrases are worth bearing in mind as one wades richly into this mammoth book.

It is, of course, the exact and unique trick of the United States that, since there’s no clearly codified list of “American landmarks,” this book is even at all possible, plus ditto that, by and large, “America” still retains its greatest thrust and power (culturally) as an idea, not as a thing. Like grace or beauty or porn, America is easier to recognize than to define. More than anything, this dynamically lovely anthology makes clear that America is, in fact, a matter of framing.

The chapter you’ve likely already heard about, if you’ve heard anything about this book, is the one on Linda Lovelace (the star of Deep Throat). American? Sure. Her autobiography, though? Is that culturally elemental in a literary history of America? Ann Marlowe says yes. How about a conference entitled “The Asian Experience in America—Yellow Identity,” which went down on January 11, 1969? Hua Hsu says yes.

As anyone whose read Marcus’s stuff would likely be able to guess, this book fits in nicely with the larger body of his work: attempts at teasing out not The Secret History but rather, lower-case and plural, the secret histories. For instance: William Rehnquist is name-checked in this book half as many times as is the movie Rear Window; Max Roach is as common as Marianne Moore; unsurprisingly, H. L. Mencken’s noted in these pages more often than Elvis, the Massachusetts Bay Company, Pauline Kael, or the Founding Fathers. Janis Joplin doesn’t get mentioned; Reagan garners five times the citations of Obama.

At the risk of making the hodge-podge seem just that, the fascinating part of this book is not, in fact, the secret histories at play: what’s fascinating is that while “America” may be an idea, it’s clearly closer to something like a self-aware muscle. It’s damn near impossible to read about, say, someone like Emerson and not hear, later, echoes of him in Dylan; I’d read Michael Ventura writing about anything at all, and his chapter on Elia Kazan and Hollywood blacklists is eerily parallel to Susan Castillo’s account of the Salem witch trials. There are these sorts of overlaps all through this collection and, strangely, even the accounts of what’s been horrible about this country end up making one feel overwhelmingly grateful that the country exists in the non-unified and impure ways it does.

Why? Because of the last two chapters in the book: one on Hurricane Katrina and one on Obama’s election. Because those things happened shoulder-to-shoulder, historically, in this country. Because you’ll cry at each of them. Because, unlike older countries, we’re still making ourselves, and the true root of our democracy is that, in fact, we all get to take part in that creation. Plus, given the historical moment, we’re allowed not only to make ourselves as a country but also to continually remake the past as well. It’s a heady freedom, all this ability to take pencil to history’s draft and trace new lines through old events, and Marcus, Sollors, and their several dozen accomplices have offered a fine new view of the whole shaggy, baggy monster that is the United States of America.

Weston Cutter’s from Minnesota, edits Corduroy Books, and has work coming soon in The Gettysburg Review, The Sonora Review, and Third Coast.