America Fantastica by Tim O'Brien (review)

Reviewed by: America Fantastica by Tim O'Brien Patrick Hicks Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica. New York: Mariner Books, 2023. 449 pp. 32. 00 (hardcover). Tim O'Brien was born and raised in southern Minnesota. After graduating summa cum laude from Macalester College in May 1968, he planned to do post-graduate study at Harvard. Instead, he was drafted into the army at a YMCA in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and sent to the Quang Ngai Province in Vietnam. While in uniform, he received a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and the Combat Infantryman's Badge. He was honorably discharged in March 1970 with the rank of sergeant. After returning home, O'Brien picked up where he left off: he went to Harvard and worked as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post. He also wrote his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973), and this searing condemnation of the Vietnam War launched his literary career. His subsequent books include Northern Lights (1975), Going After Cacciato (1978), The Nuclear Age (1985), In Lake of the Woods (1994), Tomcat in Love (1998), July, July (2002), and Dad's Maybe Books (2020). O'Brien is best known for his literary masterpiece, The Things They Carried (1990), which will be read for generations to come and may well be remembered as one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. He has won the National Book Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger Award, the O. Henry Award, the James Fenimore End Page 250 Cooper Prize, the Katherine Ann Porter Award, the Mark Twain Award, and he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. O'Brien's latest novel—his first in over twenty years—is America Fantastica. It is a wild, hilarious road trip that includes some of the most colorful characters O'Brien has created. It is also a novel about the culture of lying in America. O'Brien calls this "mythomania" and nearly every character in this fast-paced narrative is dishonest. There is, as O'Brien states, a pandemic of lying everywhere—it is a "nationwide lying infection. " (28) The story begins with a bank robbery. Boyd Halverson, a disgruntled manager of a J C Penney's, sticks up Community National Bank for 81, 000 in Fulda, California. (The name of this fictitious town is no doubt taken from Fulda, Minnesota, which is just twenty miles north from where O'Brien grew up. ) Boyd takes a petite motormouth of a woman hostage. Angie Bing talks so much that Boyd quickly feels that her voice box must be "constructed of space-age titanium" (26). They flee to Mexico and then go on the run through California, Texas, Minnesota, and Deadwood, South Dakota. Even though Boyd rarely, if ever, tells the truth, Angie soon falls in love with him. We also learn that he is a contributor to the Truth Teller Seed, an online purveyor of lies. Although the disinformation spread on this website is ridiculous, people nevertheless believe it. These lies include "fake unfake" news such as: the Electoral College assassinated President Kennedy, Rutherford B. Hayes and James Polk never really existed, a Boy Scout named Edgar Pitts recently invented a portable nuclear bomb, Hilary Clinton really wrote The Story of Little Black Sambo, and that the FDA has proven that guns prevent tonsillitis. (62–64) As the novel progresses, we learn that Boyd may not be his real name. He could be called Junior, Boyd Birdsong, Otis Birdsong, Otis Jones or even Blackie. Boyd may or may not be a veteran. He may or may not have attended Princeton. He may or may not have been nominated for a Pulitzer. As Boyd and Angie drive across the United States, they are pursued by Randy Zapf, a dim psychopath with some of the best lines in the novel. They are also followed by Boyd's ex-wife, Evelyn Kirakossian, a bruiser of a man named Henry Speck who is hellbent on roughing up Boyd with a monkey wrench, another pair of goons called Cyrus and Carl, as well as a racist cop named Toby Van Der Kellen. Along the way, there are murders. . .