Reading "Thank You for Your Service"

This book is an incredible portrait of people trying to keep going after experiencing the trauma of war that scared them in ways that are not easily seen.  The heroes of this book are not the ones you can see that they sacrificed limb or life for.  They have more subtle disabilities that you can’t see, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

Earlier wars called it shell shock or battle fatigue, but we have better understandings of what is happening to soldier’s brains, even if the treatments are not easy to bring to all who need them.  We haven’t gotten to everyone, and that is one of the great tragedies of the book, which hints at the shifting focus of leadership in the military.  We may never treat all who need it, in part to the continuing stigma of mental issues.  I have to admit, while I was reading the book I had one of those macho fantasies where I was thinking to myself that I wouldn’t have an issue with my brain.  I was too tough. Reading about the men who faced war for multiple tours and the horrors that have to be impossible to convey a tiny fraction of reality through print media made me realize I wasn’t too tough.  Saying “Thank you for your service” is both a genuine sentiment – I am glad it wasn’t me, but also hollow because we can never understand what we are thanking them for.

Hold on for the Ride: Reading "Going Postal"

Moist Von Lipwig is a con man.  He has just been hanged under the name of Spangler.  Spangler is dead, but Von Lipwig has talents, so Lord Veternari, the Tyrant if Ankh-Morpork, gives Von Lipwig another chance.

The mails have been dying.  New technology has made the postal service useless.  It exists as a black hole of old messages and old dreams.  Two men  and decades of letters live at the post office.  If you listen long enough, you can hear the letters speaking to you.  Four previous post masters have let the letters lead them to death.

Will Moist overcome the obstacles, and history?  Will he become the new hero of Ankh-Morpork?

What do you think?  This is a Terry Pratchett book.  Of course there’s going to be an manic hero.

Just hold on for the ride, as you….Go Postal.

If you have not read any of Pratchett’s books, this is as good a place to start as any.  I suppose the beginning may be better, but it is not wholly necessary.  I started in medias res and everything ended up just fine. 

The title of the thing is “Dissident Gardens”.

This is not just the setting, but the place in Queens is a character in itself.

I find that when you can say that about a novel, you have a heavy burden to populate that setting with interesting characters.  I think Lethem failed on that account.  

The novel covers three generations of leftists who live in the housing complex, focused on one family.  It opens with about eighty pages of a mother and a daughter arguing.  I had trouble figuring out who was who.  Then it switched places and time and looked at this other guy, then this other guy, and then finally this other guy.  

There’s a part where a character hallucinates that she is part of Archie Bunker’s crew hanging out at the bar.

In the span of three pages, Lethem kills off three characters with only a later elaboration on what happened. 

You start to care about the characters, and then he switches from their narrative.  It is only much later in the book when it starts to come together, but buy then I was reading to finish the thing and not to enjoy it.  I read this book over the course of three or four weeks, and I wouldn’t have finished it if not for the fact that it was a library book that was coming due.

And it is a shame, because in earlier – less ambitious – works I loved the city and the characters and the story that Lethem created. 

He doesn’t do that here, and that’s a shame.