The best books about being changed by war

This book gave me license to bend the truth, the setting, and to use myself, or some bizarre version of myself as a main character. O’Brien is the one who made it okay for me to do whatever the hell I wanted in the stories I wrote. It may not appear to be avant garde writing, but it certainly showed me how to play with convention and storytelling. Like a lot of veteran writers in the last thirty years, I used this book as a template in a lot of ways.

Orwell captures the dilemma of empire so well that every time I read it, my nerves get raw. It’s a trap. Everyone is dehumanized, the oppressors and the oppressed. The sneering townspeople, the trips on the football pitch, the clear-sighted way the crowd intuits the relationship between themselves and the young policeman all ring true. The villagers can control him because they understand the expectations he has as an official of the crown. They use his strength against him to get what they want. He doesn’t want to kill the elephant, but it’s expected of him, so he gruesomely shoots into the elephant's mouth till, like the British empire, it finally dies. The villagers pillage the carcass for meat. For Orwell, empire itself is brutal suicide. 

For my money, Hemingway is the greatest American short story writer. He is spare and direct until he isn’t. The meter and clipped phrasing and short sentences set up bigger, longer runs that are beautiful and often explain what it’s like to be a human being without being obvious or careless. They never feel false and are edited down to the bone. That’s probably what I learned most from Hemingway, the editing. Just picking a story, “On the Quai at Smyrna,” has such a staccato matter-of-factness that belies just how awful the situation there on the pier must have been. The narrator is hardened and recounts the events so matter-of-factly that you know they’ll come back later, once he is home and has time to reflect on them.  

I know this is a bit of a conceit. Jay wasn’t really changed by war in the way we’re talking about, but he did return a different man than when he left. I really just wanted to talk about the influence of Fitzgerald’s musicality, his incredible prose, on how I try to write. He’s writing a song, it seems to me, and when I read it, it’s like a spell and I think I vibrate at a different frequency than before I read it. Hunter Thompson had it too, but Fitzgerald was before him. Also, it has my favorite last line ever…I probably wrote an entire book based on that line.

It doesn’t end well for old Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” but the way Salinger writes him, with his ability to revere the innocent child while detesting the phony adult world rings true. This is why Salinger is dangerous. If reading a book like this rings too true, it’s hard not to go through life seeing the adult world as corrupt and duplicitous. It puts a bug in one’s operating system. Salinger is kind of patient zero for a lot of young people who see the world a bit differently. On the surface, Nine Stories doesn’t seem like a war book, but both Seymour and Salinger himself fought the Germans in France, and without actually mentioning the war, it’s clear that the battle Seymour loses is with PTSD.