Tim O’Brien, this year’s William Starr Distinguished Lecturer, writes about a seemingly endless war, and a politician caught in a lie about his controversial past. To the incoming class, these words may read like the headlines of today’s New York Times, but in his 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods, O’Brien is referring to Vietnam – the war that shook his own generation’s college experience.
O’Brien’s 1968 graduation from Macalester College ended with a diploma and a draft notice. Against the war, he served in Vietnam, and his unit was enlisted during the Mai Lai Massacre. When his tour ended in 1970, he enrolled in Harvard’s graduate school, but left to pursue a newspaper internship, and then to write his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), a compelling memoir of his time in Vietnam. Soon after, O’Brien established himself as a fiction writer with Northern Lights (1975) and Going after Cacciato, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979. After 1985’s Nuclear Age, O’Brien continued to interweave Vietnam into his stories. In 1990, The Things They Carried was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and In the Lake of the Woods was named by Time as the best novel of 1994. Tomcat in Love (1998) and July, July (2002) followed.
Though many of his novels involve scenes and characters associated with Vietnam, O’Brien does not consider himself a Vietnam writer. “I don’t write about bombs and bullets, I write about the human heart. It’s just the subject matter that was given to me,” he told the Baltimore City Paper shortly before the publication of In the Lake of the Woods. The mystery novel, and also the class of 2011’s suggested summer reading, was praised by the New York Times as “a novel about the unforgivable uses of history, about what happens when you try to pretend that history no longer exists.” It also raises questions about the ethics of politics, and the role citizens play in times of war.
The stories O’Brien tells often refer to events that happened over 30 years ago, yet still remain relevant today. In Iraq and Vietnam “there’s the similarity with the difficulty in finding the enemy,” he told a reporter at the University of Dayton. “In Vietnam, we couldn’t find the V.C., they were blended in with the population, and we’re having the same problem in Iraq.”
On Thursday, September 27, O’Brien will deliver the William Starr Freshman Course Lecture, at 5:30pm in the Vassar Chapel. The annual lecture brings a distinguished author to campus to speak to first-year students about the writing life. The lecture is open to the Vassar community and the general public.