‘America Fantastica’: Tim O’Brien’s First Novel in 20 Years

Tim O’Brien’s sprawling, brash new novel has nothing whatsoever to do with the Vietnam War or Vietnam War veterans. In America Fantastica (Mariner Books, 464 pp., $32), O’Brien spins out a careening, Pynchon-esque tale set in 2019 and 2020, peopled with quirky characters in a fast-moving plot spiced up with dollops of current-day politicization.

Mea culpa: It’s a bit unfair to Tim O’Brien by saying that the book doesn’t have anything to do with the American war in Vietnam or its veterans. Still, that fact cannot go unmentioned in a review meant primarily for Vietnam War veterans for two reasons. First, because Tim O’Brien served a memorable, life-informing tour of duty as an infantryman in the war. Second, because two of his best books—the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato, and the brilliant The Things They Carried, one of the most celebrated and popular works of fiction in the last fifty years—deal with the war.

To be clear, Tim O’Brien is one of the most accomplished American fiction writers, period. For more than 40 years, he has been bringing fictional characters alive on the page in all of his literary work, while brilliantly evoking physical and emotional landscapes and spinning meaningful and terrific yarns. It’s not for nothing that he has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

America Fantastica, O’Brien’s first novel in twenty years, centers on a laconic, melancholy, chronic liar who goes by the name of Boyd Halverson and his whack-a-doodle family circle. It begins with Boyd, a recovering journalist, robbing a bank in Northern California and taking a female teller named Angie hostage. Together, they embark on a convoluted quest that takes them to Mexico, Texas, California, Minnesota, and places in between.

The plot toggles between realism and satire as Boyd, Angie, and a bunch of other oversized characters—including greedy capitalists and dangerously deranged blue-collar and plain-old-regular criminals—careen from one misadventure to another. And it had me turning pages like mad as things came to a hectic, surprising conclusion.

—Marc Leepson

November 21, 2023

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