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.
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.
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."
RSS