Picador
September 2003
Watega County is supposedly somewhere in Illinois, but Daniel Buckman places it smack dab in the twilight zone. Every man in every generation of the farming and factory families of Watega County went off to war, and for each lucky enough to return home, time stopped. Veterans of WWI cough up remnants of mustard gas as they silently brood over the fields of dead in France. Their sons spend their golden years swatting mosquitoes that remind them of Japanese fighter planes in WWII. Their grandsons shoot heroin and pass the time in bars while trading stories of younger days in Saigon.
Women aren't very welcome in Watega County. They are allowed to stay in town long enough to help the men of the town procreate, and then they disappear. The men of Watega County appear to prefer the company of other men. It is a joyless existence spawning homosexual encounters that just end in rage and guilt, the only emotions that the county residents seem to muster.
September 2003
Watega County is supposedly somewhere in Illinois, but Daniel Buckman places it smack dab in the twilight zone. Every man in every generation of the farming and factory families of Watega County went off to war, and for each lucky enough to return home, time stopped. Veterans of WWI cough up remnants of mustard gas as they silently brood over the fields of dead in France. Their sons spend their golden years swatting mosquitoes that remind them of Japanese fighter planes in WWII. Their grandsons shoot heroin and pass the time in bars while trading stories of younger days in Saigon.
Women aren't very welcome in Watega County. They are allowed to stay in town long enough to help the men of the town procreate, and then they disappear. The men of Watega County appear to prefer the company of other men. It is a joyless existence spawning homosexual encounters that just end in rage and guilt, the only emotions that the county residents seem to muster.
With such a population of emotionally repressed veterans, you would think that Daniel Buckman is trying to make a statement about war. Instead, Buckman treats war as only a coincidental factor to the state of the American male. The author reminds us that "Vietnam didn't make one crazy who wasn't crazy before he got there," and "he wanted revenge a long time before Vietnam." In Buckman's world men may try to hide their nature in the clothing of civilization, but "…you can't help seeing apes when you look at men."
Buckman has a tendency to use symbolism to excess, hitting his readers over the head with it. He establishes a vision of a segregated black community that has the appearance of more joy and freedom than the supposedly more prosperous white society, a theme often found in Beat fiction but which appears completely out of place in a novel set in mid 1980's Illinois. His writing style is quick and flowing, carrying the reader through the story without every feeling bogged down. Unfortunately, it moves so quickly that one isn't really sure where the journey took him or what he was supposed to gain from the experience.
Buckman has a tendency to use symbolism to excess, hitting his readers over the head with it. He establishes a vision of a segregated black community that has the appearance of more joy and freedom than the supposedly more prosperous white society, a theme often found in Beat fiction but which appears completely out of place in a novel set in mid 1980's Illinois. His writing style is quick and flowing, carrying the reader through the story without every feeling bogged down. Unfortunately, it moves so quickly that one isn't really sure where the journey took him or what he was supposed to gain from the experience.
