In Conversation with Tim O'Brien

Tim O’Brien took the last 21 years off from writing novels to raise his two boys. When he finally did return to the craft, it was to write America Fantastica, a book that wades into our fraught political moment, when bullets fly in our schools and nobody can agree on the meaning of truth. 

O’Brien’s protagonist Boyd Halverson is a disgraced journalist and fake war hero who kidnaps his favorite bank teller, Angie Bing, to take her on an odyssey through the American West, full of cars, guns, crime, money, movies, skin care, RVs, talk radio, baseball, and liars in public places. 

Reached by phone earlier this fall at his home in Austin, Texas—just over 1,000 miles from his birthplace of Austin, Minnesota—he sounds convincing when he says, “I think it’s my best.” 

Perhaps a bold statement from the Harvard grad and Vietnam veteran who won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato in 1979 and whose 1990 book of short stories, The Things They Carried, is still universally regarded as an American classic—one that has yet to be removed from thousands of high school English courses across the country. 

One of America Fantastica’s settings is the northern Minnesota forests, where O’Brien’s dad would take him on hapless fishing trips on the Whitefish Chain as a kid. O’Brien swears this is going to be his last book—“I’m going to be 77 in October, and I’m not going to write another one”—and, because of that fact, he even tried to convince his wife to let him retire to our lake country. 

“My wife and I went up there to look for a summer house,” he says. “We were at a little place having dinner outside—walleye, of course—and the flies were so thick that the walleye was black.” He says his wife looked up from her dinner and said, “We’re not moving here.”

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Trifecta

Three things about Tim O’Brien

1. He was student body president at Macalester College before graduating in 1968 and being drafted into Vietnam.
2. He became a father for the first time at the age of 56.
3. He’s down to smoking less than a pack of Carltons a day. “That’s the truth.”

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You have this thread that runs through the entire novel: this contagion of mythomania that’s kind of rapidly progressing in the country.

Pseudologia fantastica. It’s the psychological term for pathological lying.

And it’s, like, straight from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, right?

Yeah. I just elevated it to the element of fantasy. It’s not contagious, of course, but in a satire, I decided I’d make it contagious.

If you could diagnose America, who is patient zero? From which wet market did this condition originate?

I’m not a psychologist, so don’t hold me to this in any medical sense, but my bottom line would be reality is insufficient for a lot of people. Maybe even for most of us. Maybe even for all of us. Say the reality we’re all going to die someday; we’ll substitute a game of bridge or playing golf or going to the baseball game—almost anything we can do to avoid suicide, to avoid depression by reality. And the characters in this book feel they have to substitute fantasy for reality. 

And for me, the interesting part is fantasy is probably necessary to keep us going—that tomorrow will be better than today, or that we’ll win the lottery, or the days of Ozzie and Harriet will return. It’s when it gets out of hand and begins to threaten core values that it becomes a big problem for me. And so, I wanted to write a fun, entertaining book, but serious at the same time, kind of what Jonathan Swift would do with Gulliver’s Travels or Mark Twain did with Letters from the Earth or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. They’re entertaining, but at the core, Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift were pissed-off people.

In the same way that Huck Finn is a racist who’s almost unintentionally moral, your protagonist Boyd is a pathological liar, but you’re obviously sympathetic to him. You seem to really understand that guy. Are you a great liar yourself?

One answer is I’m a fiction writer, and I’ve always described it as lying for profit. In my personal life, I don’t—I try not to lie, although I think everybody has. Even white lies without thinking about it. I get on elevators and people ask me, “How are you doing?” And I’ll say, “Fine.” I think Boyd’s basic issue is self-esteem. He’s got a low one, and he’s making up for it with making up lies. I went to USC, but I’m going to say I went to Princeton. I was never in a war, but I’m going to pretend I’m a war hero. He lies about his height. He lies about his age. He lies about everything, essentially. What saves him for me is he’s aware of it to the point where he’s ridden with guilt over how he betrayed not only his wife but himself, ultimately, with the castle of lies. And he wants to pay for it.

Your other protagonist is Angie. Wasn’t hers the first voice you heard in your head?

Yeah. I had written 15 pages that now are now part of the second chapter of the book—the bank robbery and the so-called kidnapping. I fell in love with Angie. I wouldn't want to be around her in the real world, but there's something about how nonstop she is, how determined, so confident about herself and everything. And I was intrigued by a few things she had said early on about her background and her mother throwing a stapler at her. I remember that detail struck me and made me want to know more about her background, which was poverty stricken. She describes herself as trailer trash. Father is a preacher without a congregation. His congregation is basically his family. Kind of a mushroom-growing libertarian creature of the Word.

Kind of like an Okie?

Yeah. He reminds me of a Ruby Ridger with a Pentecostal streak, but he's Old Testament Pentecostal. He's mean and tough—all the values associated with the Old Testament but not much with the New. A guy I wouldn't want to have as a father. Angie's background really did appeal to me, especially when I learned more and more by writing about it.     

It's funny how as a fiction writer I don't plan this stuff. I'm just intrigued by the word stapler. And that led me to the next sentence about her background, and that sentence led me to the next and the next. And by the end, I felt I knew her as well as I've ever known any character I've written about, including Boyd. I liked her more than any other character I've written about, even though I would not spend more than 10 minutes with her without getting the hell out of the room.

I guess the one thing that I kind of struggled with in the book—Boyd and Angie are obviously into each other. Why wouldn't Boyd sleep with her?

Yeah. I know. Boyd is a moralist. He talks about this directly to Angie late in the book, and she says, “I know why you wouldn't sleep with me.” He says, “Why?” She says, “Because you know I'd be a widow, and I'd be a woman without her man. You're going to kill yourself.”

Yeah, he's suicidal.

“That’s been your plan from day one.” And he says, “That's pretty much it.” He has a moralistic streak that is odd in a way, because he doesn't mind lying about stuff. But in other ways, he's penitent, repentant, and he knows what he has in store for himself and, therefore, what would be in store for Angie. She’d be looking at a corpse.

Right, right. Boyd is obviously attracted to her. Part of me was kind of rooting for them. Were you tempted to give in to a happy ending for Boyd and Angie?

Yeah, I was frequently tempted. Always discarded the notion. I guess I just didn't want to add to the American, maybe worldwide, fantasy of happily ever after endings. That seemed to be capitulating to a pretty common fantasy that things will at least be better.

Minnesota has been cast as an oasis in some of your other books, but in this one there’s a Heart of Darkness, Coen brothers quality to it with the black flies Up North in the summer and the early October snow, the fake Finnish prostitute from Eau Claire and her small-time crook of a partner. Are you a fan of the Coens? Have you guys ever run into each other?

No, I’ve never met them. I loved No Country for Old Men. I love Fargo. I don’t know some of their movies, but those two I really, really liked. I think what we share is Minnesota. We grew up there, and we know what’s fun to skewer and what to stay away from. This fantasy of “Minnesota nice”—it’s not all that way. You live there. You know that. It’s got its nasty people and its con men, and its poor, betrodden Indian people.

For such a small-town Minnesota boy, there are so many rich captains of industry in this book. So much of it is set in the Hollywood dream factory, amongst the manufacturers of the biggest lies in the culture. Have you dealt with the crazy wealthy in your life? Have you done cocaine through a monogrammed straw?

No! I don’t know—I must know some rich people. I can’t remember who I know, but I’m sure I’ve encountered them. I was trying to satirize or make a burlesque out of what I see on television and in the movies. A lot of our fantasies grow not out of the world we live in, but we borrow them from Hollywood. I mean, every single western we watch, things are settled by guns. And it’s found its way into a distorted and dangerous artery running through the blood of the American body. I think that a good deal of what’s happening with guns in our country—God knows it’s almost every day now—can be ascribed to Bonnie and Clyde, to Shane and to John Wayne and Hopalong Cassidy. Gunplay became the American way in Hollywood. 

I have a line in the book that guns have now been decreed a living human creature, just like corporations have been. They’re that sacred to a lot of people—not just a lot; a whole bunch of people. 

It’s a book that tries to look at the underlying causes and consequences of our fantasies. That’s where the title came from. I was doing dishes one day: How do I describe the book? And the word fantasy brought me to the dictionary, and it brought me to that term pseudologia fantastica—the lying disease.

“Reality is insufficient for a lot of people. Maybe even for most of us. Maybe even for all of us.”

—Tim O’Brien, National Book Award–Winning Novelist

You’re really good at being in the head of the cop and the soldier. This understanding doesn’t come from the movies—you were a soldier yourself. Even though in Vietnam some of them had a dismissive nickname for you—

“College Joe.”

Yes. So, while there may be some mutual skepticism, you’ve been around soldiers and cops long enough that you obviously understand them.

I know how to listen. My whole life, I’ve listened to people. Probably the greatest fun I had in writing this book was going into all these different heads—the heads of a billionaire businessman, and the head of his wife and the head of somebody like Randy, especially Randy.

Yeah, Randy.

I’ve met Randys in my life, and I'll bet you have too. They're almost likable in their amorality and therefore, they're kind of hard to pin down. But it was fun doing all these different voices. As a writer, it's a kind of invitation and a challenge at the same time—to become a voice or character that you aren't and try to be faithful to what you've heard in your life, the words you've heard and the postures of these people. To try to be faithful to them and not just make fun of them. This guy Randy yearns to be Charles Manson. It's his fantasy in life. I want to end up in the prison he was in.

Yeah, he loves hanging out with those cons and their stories about Charlie Manson eating spaghetti.

That was fun making just that little detail up. Wraps around a spool on his finger and dips it in—I mean, it's fucking ridiculous but fun to make up. And who knows? Maybe he did. I don't know. For a novelist, that was a big part of the fun, this big cast of characters and being able to become those characters for however long it took me to write one of those ones.

There's this scene when Boyd is confronting the guy who’s wearing the funny Gulf War hat in Corpus Christi. There's a dispute about stolen valor. And even though Boyd is lying about his own military record, he gets offended by this guy making a pun out of war. And I see that in our culture, this oversensitivity, getting offended on behalf of others, while not being honest about our own shortcomings.

Or our just outright hypocrisy. Boyd shoots a hole in the guy's table for stealing valor even though he's been doing it in spades for his entire life. Again, as a novelist, the contradictions inside people are just fascinating, and they're the most fun thing to write about in. Because I guess that's what humans are. We're all contradictory.

It isn’t just Trumpy guys who are hypocrites. It feels endemic in American life.

Some of the most famous examples of stolen valor come from the world of academics. A couple of extremely well-known actors too. None of these people had to lie. None of them were Trumpy conspiracy kinds of people. They were successful people in their fields, lying about this stuff. I’m suspicious of a couple of friends of mine. I'm not totally sure that these guys who claim they were in Vietnam were there. I think you're absolutely right. I don't think it's related to politics. I think it's more some desire to alter an uncomfortable reality.

I have a passage from the Things They Carried hanging on my wall about the truth in a war story. I’ve never fought in a war, and I don't write fiction for a living—or at least I try not to—so I don't even know what draws me to this story, but I think it’s this idea that a war story isn’t a morality tale, and the specificity of a lie or of a myth can actually be more revealing of truth than the truth. As you wrote, the truth is in the smirk on the guy's face after he jumps on the grenade. This idea that bullshit can actually be more insightful than the real thing. Like you said, you know how to listen. But do you withhold judgment while knowing you’re being lied to?  

Yeah. There's the forgiveness aspect of it, the understanding. I gave a talk for a professor at a symposium on Vietnam. Some part of him felt inadequate about teaching and writing about Vietnam. I don't think [he] was a bad human being. I met him, and I really, really liked him. I think, like a lot of lies, they begin in an unconsidered kind of way: Just comes out of your mouth. Then you have to elaborate on it, and then you're asked questions about it, and it just grows and grows and grows and grows. It’s bad, but it’s also understandable.

You became a father later in life. Do you think having kids later helped tenderize you or keep you tender?

I didn’t want kids, number one. I almost didn’t marry my wife because of our battle over that. In fact, we broke up temporarily for a month or so. I thought, How could she like the idea of something more than she loved me? She wasn’t going to marry me unless I agreed to this, and I thought that was crocodilian. I loved her, so I gave in. I said OK and did it. 

But I gave up writing because I wanted to be a good father. I just quit. I knew I couldn’t do both. When I write, it’s 19-hour days. If I’m not writing, I’m worried about it or thinking about it, and I just knew I couldn’t be a good dad, so I quit. And those 18 years were the best of my life. I loved something more than myself and more than my books—the lives of these two kids—and it was not a hard thing to do. Writing had always been—still is—torture for me. It’s sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, and it’s frustrating. There are moments of exhilaration, and finally a sentence seems OK, but it’s torture and slow. So having Timmy and Tad—my two kids—was amazing. I was so incompetent as a father, and it’s amazing that they’re still alive. It’s almost impossible to believe they survived me, but they did.

Do you consider your books an extension of yourself, or are your characters creations, like your children?

I know the people in my book as well as I know my kids. 

Wow.

That’s not true of all the minor characters, but it’s true with the main characters of all of them. I’ve lived with them for years. Takes me four, five, six, seven, sometimes nine years to write a book. And when I think about them, it’s the same way I think about my kids, my wife, you, everybody else in the world. They’re not on a different plane. 

You made this Faustian bargain with yourself to lay to rest your profession in order to be a father because, like you said, sometimes writing supersedes professional boundaries. It's more of an obsession than a profession.

Well said.

Did you have to train after taking 20 years off? When did Angie pipe up?

No, I didn’t train, exactly. I just jumped off the diving board into the water, kind of hoping for the best. Angie had been with me for 20 years. Long time. I’d written about her way, way back. And she just stayed with me. I stopped writing about her because I didn’t have a story for her. 

The world delivered a story in 2015–16, somewhere in there, with the politics of this country and gun shootings and the conspiracy theory stuff. My response to all that was, There’s Angie, who can take me through this with some laughter and some lightheartedness, so I could write about it with some humor. Without laughter or entertainment, it would have been like writing a screed, and I didn’t want to write a screed. I wanted to write a novel. So, the two happily conjoined. 

Is she your first fully three-dimensional protagonist who's a female?

I’m thinking. I think the answer’s yes. The word protagonist for sure.

The hero.

Yeah. I mean, I've had other big characters. In Going After Cacciato, Sarkin Aung Wan was a big character. She was a dream. She was a fantasy in the head of Paul Berlin and not flesh-and-blood real in the way that Angie became. As I said, the most fun I've ever had as a writer was really writing Angie’s scenes.

I mean, you're obviously in love with her.

I am. In the novelistic way—as I said, I wouldn't want to be around her for 10 minutes. She’d drive me nuts. I don't want to be her fifth fiancé.

Has she receded from your subconscious?

No, she's still there. She'll always be there.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.