There is a moment in Anthony Swofford's debut novel when his main female character — a tearaway half-Japanese, half-American girl called Virginia — is trying to explain her collapsing relationship with her overpowering military father. "My father loves me, but he is afflicted by me," the troubled young woman says.
The same can be said for Swofford's relationship with the US military and with war itself. As the author of the hugely successful memoir Jarhead (2003), Swofford was made by war. His depiction of what it was like to be an American marine during the first Gulf War was an immense critical and commercial success. It catapulted him from the life of a former soldier striving to come to terms with his experiences to that of one of America's leading literary lights. He has since had the experience of watching Hollywood heart-throb Jake Gyllenhaal play him, agonizing over his desire to kill the enemy, in a 2005 movie version of the book.
Now, as his first novel, Exit A, hits the shelves, it is still war that Swofford is seeking to explain and explore. Not least his own experiences in the thick of it: "I was very good at being a marine. But I also wanted, in the end, to leave and rid myself of the weight of those experiences, to live differently, to live better and live more morally," he says.
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Swofford is sitting in the bar of the Maritime Hotel on the edge of Manhattan's fashionable Meatpacking District; it's a Friday evening, and outside, the young and beautiful crowds are gathering in bars and restaurants. Swofford doesn't quite fit in. His bushy beard makes him look a little older than his 36 years. It also makes him look decidedly unmilitary. In fact, he is a former elite sniper, trained to kill at distances of more than a kilometer.
But there is a steel to him. He regards people a little warily and his answers are short and to the point, efficiently dealing with a situation and moving on. That style is reflected in the punchy, rat-a-tat sentences that characterize Exit A, shooting out the characters and marching on with the plot. The military never lurks far beneath the surface, which is perhaps why Swofford is becoming one of the foremost literary explorers of modern war, from the battlefield to the home front. It is the latter that Exit A concerns itself with, swapping Jarhead's despoiled Kuwaiti oilfields for a sprawling US military base in Japan.
It tells the story of a young American boy, Severin Boxx; the ageing, hard-as-nails General Kindwall; and his young daughter, Virginia. All three live on the base, striving to replicate a suburban American life in the Far East. There is no war here, but emblems of conflict are everywhere: in the military hardware, the brutal coaching of the base's American football team and — most importantly — in the fraught relationships of the three main characters. Severin falls in love with Virginia, who has rebelled against her father by falling in with the local criminals. The Exit A of the title refers to the highway off-ramp that leads to a seedy neighborhood near the base where Virginia hangs out with gangsters and pimps. Unsurprisingly, it all goes horribly wrong.
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In many ways the novel shows how those around the military pay a high price for all that implied violence. "I wanted to show the impact of it all on the military dependants," says Swofford, "on the families on the base and the sort of lives that can be led there. There is death-causing machinery all around you as you try to lead a normal American life on the base. That can't not have an effect."
Swofford knows all about this. He too was brought up in a military family and spent four years as a child on a base near Tokyo. There he lived in a US-style home, with a mall and American shops and restaurants. Ironically, he says he enjoyed it. "Those four years were one of the most special times in my family. It was on that base that we were the most cohesive and functional, and a lot of that was because we were on that base, isolated, so family became important to us."
The characters in Exit A are not so lucky. The pressures of military life seem to have removed any chance of them developing a genuine sense of love. And though Swofford led a happy childhood on his own base, growing up in a military family has left him with issues. In Jarhead, he described watching US marines on television and believing that warfare was the only way to express manhood. That led to his decision to join up at 17.
But Exit A is less concerned with Swofford's own choices than those of his elder brother. Jeff was more of a rebel, who pushed against the "gypsy lifestyle" of military family. Swofford admits that Severin is in part an exploration of what Jeff might have done. "It's a bit of a fantasy," he says. Jeff died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1998. "I shouldn't be talking about this. It's not about the book," he says swiftly but politely.
So far, reactions to Exit A have been a mixture of lavish praise and harsh critique. He says he does not care either way. "A writing mentor once told me that good reviews are only good for the author's ego and bad reviews are bad for the author's ego. Neither situation is very helpful, so I don't read any reviews. There is nothing any review could teach me, good or bad."
A good soldier still, Swofford remains stubbornly on his mission. He is already working on his second novel; this time he is tackling head-on America's second foray into Iraq and its terrible consequences. He is planning a story of two brothers in New York — one an artistic type, the other a soldier returning from his second tour of duty. They sound like both sides of Swofford's own experience. Given the current political climate in America, it is likely to be controversial.
"Right now, war is fertile ground in America," he says. "It is the number one topic in terms of understanding America for other people and also for Americans themselves." That may be good news for Swofford's admiring fans, but it's bad news for the rest of the world.
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