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Memoir writer exits the familiar
By KIT REED Special to the Times
Published February 5, 2007
Although they talk a good game, American audiences don't really like to be surprised. Readers picking up a second book by a highly praised writer usually want more of the same - or variations on the same - which accounts for the popularity of brand name authors with multiple titles that come neatly packaged, like cereal. Idols aren't allowed to stray from the expected. Will ex-Marine Anthony Swofford, whose gritty Gulf War memoir Jarhead pleased critics and made the bestseller lists, be forgiven for switching genres in midstream? The jury is still out. No 'literary' novel Exit A is far from an instant replay of Jarhead. Swofford has chosen not to reheat his life story in the microwave and dish up Chapter Two. Where Jarhead was praised as a literary memoir, Exit A is a foray into new territory by an author who either can't or won't sit down like a good boy and produce more of the same. Nor is Exit A a "literary" novel. It's a popular novel about Air Force brats who fall in love on a military base in Japan. Combining romance and intrigue, Swofford writes as though he has one eye on Hollywood and the other on airport paperback racks. And what's the matter with that? Forget Jarhead and think of this one as a first novel. It's a swift read, consistently interesting and not nearly as deep as Scribner's publicists would like us to believe. Although the press release urges reviewers to think of this as a drama about a couple playing out their story with "the geopolitical role of the U.S. military in the post-Cold War era" as backdrop, it's considerably less ambitious. It's a love story with a dash of crime thrown in. Military brats meet Drawing on his childhood as a military brat who grew up on Air Force bases, Swofford introduces teenagers who play out their version of Romeo and Juliet on the air base at Yokota, just outside Tokyo. The colonel's son falls in love with the general's daughter. Crime comes between them. It will be years before they reunite. Square, earnest Severin Boxx, a high school football hero, falls in love with Virginia Sachiko Kindwall, the troubled, capricious daughter of the base commander. Her Japanese mother died in childbirth, and the old man never quite got over it. Virginia takes out her aggression on perverts she lures into restrooms along with others in a Japanese street gang. While her father thinks of her as a "good girl," Virginia's secret life plays out in the warren of streets outside the base, where petty crime abounds. She goes out on the town packing a gun. Virginia is working for a Korean-Japanese criminal, Silver, who masterminds heists in which she holds shop owners at gunpoint. Silver wants a muscular hunk to help pull off the next job: Severin. Severin is drawn in briefly, but as Virginia's crimes escalate to kidnapping, she is lost to both her father and her lover. Meanwhile, dutiful team player that he is, Severin will do anything for his coach, who happens to be the base commander. Although civilian readers may worry and wonder, Gen. Kindwall seems to be able to manage military matters and his girlfriend, Miyoko, and coach high school football, no problem. Until everything goes wrong. By the time it does, Severin is torn between his love for Virginia and the general's orders: Find my daughter or else. Years later, the general will make the same plea. Don't worry; just read At this point, the reader has to decide whether to start asking questions - Would the kidnapping really go down the way it does? Would Kindwall really let his daughter languish in jail? - or sit back and enjoy the ride. It depends, in a way, on reader expectations. Exit A starts out with a bang, but in the years that follow the kidnapping, the narrative loses energy. We're never quite clear why Severin becomes an academic dropout, how or why his unhappy wife sets up an elaborate betrayal, or why he married her in the first place. Meanwhile, events in Virginia's life after prison seem more like summary. It's as though Swofford began with a good idea but needed to go several layers deeper to make everything work. Never mind. Exit A moves right along; it's fun while it lasts. In a way, that should be enough. Kit Reed's most recent novel is The Baby Merchant. The book Exit A By Anthony Swofford Scribner, 287 pages, $25
[Last modified February 5, 2007, 00:46:53]
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