Arthur Goldhammer’s “Shooting War”

Arthur Goldhammer’s brilliant novel Shooting War doesn’t have a subtitle, but if it did my recommendation would be “Coming of Age in the American Empire.”

All Empires depend upon a distinctive cast of characters—political leaders, strategists, true believers, reluctant warriors, cannon fodder, even protestors have their role. One of the many virtues of this large and challenging novel is that we meet all these characters, hear their arguments, and see their lives develop between the 1960s and the 2000s. Anyone coming to the novel expecting a mash-up of Platoon and The Big Chill is, however, in for a surprise. Shooting War is more Middlemarch than a standard Vietnam War novel.

Through the eyes of the protagonist Alex Sohn, we learn what it’s like to be plucked from the archives in Paris and plonked down as a low-level Spec 4 in 1968 Vietnam at the side of “young bloods” and officers, who, like the splendidly earnest Captain Hacker, can’t understand what a man like Sohn is doing there. “Someday, Sohn, you’ll have to explain to me how a Harvard man with your IQ wound up a Spec 4.”

Here’s Alex and the Captain riding a jeep into a “Shiet-nam” village, as Hacker calls it, where Alex must use his recently acquired Vietnamese to question a local chief. Hacker has all the “bravery of a child who can’t quite conceive of danger because it can’t yet imagine the world apart from itself.” Alex, in contrast, imagines too much, his educated head stuffed full of dangerously unnecessary thoughts. 

“I, driving beside him, was of grimmer countenance. I imagined things: as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t impossible that a wrinkled old geezer sitting on his haunches chewing betel and smiling blankly hated me and wanted me dead. One dead American, one free man: I’d been in France, had broken bread with people who swore by Fanon, Fanon-fanas, fous de Fanon, this was a tune I’d heard people whistle. Imperialism might have struck me as a trifle too capacious a portmanteau for what we were about in Nam, but the word was at least part of my vocabulary. Hacker as far as I could tell never whistled anything but Yankee Doodle, and he never so much as cracked a smile when he said he hoped on his next tour to see Hanoi liberated. He did carry two talismans for luck, though, a gold crucifix and a lacquered medallion of a rose that his wife had bought him in a Juarez trinket shop.”

As Alex ruminates on the differences between himself and his comrades at arms, we see someone who not only doesn’t belong but willfully refuses their efforts of comradeship. Here’s some more of his thoughts on Hacker, a man in a former life who was the Equipment Manager of the University of Oklahoma Football team, a Sooner. 

“How was I strange to him? Let me count the ways. Yankee, Jew, intellectual, contemplative, reserved, avoided whores, kept to myself, never got drunk, wrote letters to my father in German and French: “What is that, some kind of secret code?” He tried sometimes to reach across the divide: “Hey, those Israelis are something, aren’t they? Only army in the world today that knows how to kick ass is the IDF.” This was an opinion widespread among officers of his rank and time-in-grade: Benning’s instructors were big on the Six-Day War, which showed what modern arms could do when you sidelined the politicians and unleashed the genius of the military mind, sure of itself and domineering. But he could take in my responses only if he’d anticipated them. He was too slow-witted to catch surprises on the rebound. Because he had me pigeonholed as a Jew, he expected me to be filled with Zionist zeal and was nonplussed when I took the view that the Benning guys were short-sighted. In the long run it doesn’t pay to humiliate your enemy unnecessarily. Ask the French. Look what it cost the world because they insisted on humiliating the Germans at Versailles.”

If Shooting War were merely a Vietnam war novel, it would be one of the more interesting novels of that searing episode in American history. But this is a book that captures what it was like to come of age against the backdrop of war protests, the Chicago Convention riots, LBJ, Nixon, Four Dead in Ohio, and the radical transformation of moeurs, as Tocqueville would call them, from Eisenhower-era conformity to Vietnam-era experimentation.

Read as a Bildungsroman, it is difficult for the reader not to wonder about the relationship between Alex, the character, and Arthur Goldhammer, the author. Many will know that Arthur Goldhammer has had a long and illustrious career both as a translator of French texts—including Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty First Century—and commentator on French politics. Fewer will know that Goldhammer himself has a PhD in Mathematics from MIT and was drafted to serve in Vietnam, where, after a crash course in Vietnamese, he served as the translator for an army intelligence unit. Goldhammer’s biography does then track to some degree that of Alex in the novel. But it would be a mistake to think that Arthur and Alex are one and the same, not least because there’s another character in the novel that complicates this equation. That’s Peter Goldbach, “a mathematician from whom the world may one day expect great things,” who is Alex’s oldest friend. While Peter pursues Maths at MIT; Alex pursues humanities at Harvard before becoming a renowned Tocqueville scholar. In real life, Goldhammer will do first the former, and then the latter. 

The reader also can’t help but wonder why Alex didn’t pull strings to avoid being drafted to Vietnam. If Donald Trump could conjure up bone-spurs, George W. Bush wangle a cushy posting with the Texas Air National Guard, and Clinton acquire a few 2-S student deferments, then surely Alex Sohn could have done something similar? The explanation for his presence in Vietnam only emerges slowly and even then indirectly. Part of the explanation comes from his own politico-aesthetic commitments. He’s read too much Tocqueville. He’s also, one suspects, attracted to a life from which stories—and novels like his own—become possible. Alex himself tends to keep these things to himself, but, as he acknowledges:

“Certain things I couldn’t keep quiet. News of status travels fast in our classless society. Most of the grunts thought I must be a little wrong in the head. “If it was me graduated from Harvard, man, you know for damn sure I wouldn’ be in no motherfuckin’ Viet Nam”…. This was a widespread view I could respect, even if it contradicted my basic Christo-Tocquevillean premise that, precisely because of my advantages, I owed it to my brothers to share their suffering. My democratic cravings always had this suspect tincture of Frenchness, see, this problematic notion of republican fraternity that has us all perpetually in debt to one another. The troops as was only fitting had more of the true Yankee spirit, every man for himself.”

Much of the action of Shooting War is set in the early 2000s when the filming of Alex’s autobiographical novel takes place. Here we encounter the same characters from the 1960s as mature adults along with a set of new characters playing them in the film. A now middle-aged Alex is acting as script consultant to the British film director, James Goldthwaite. This narrative device allows for a full exploration of character formation, the passage of time from an era of optimism to one of enervation, and meditations on life’s pathways, chosen and unchosen.

 

From the perspective of the 2000s, the character of Barbara Simon moves to the center of the novel. Her transformation is the most interesting. We first encounter her early in the novel emerging from a bedroom naked from the waist down, while a 19 year old Alex and his friends sit there in slack-jawed amazement as she administers to the care of their friend Michael, who is dripping blood from an injured thumb. As Alex recalls:

 

“God, she was gorgeous. But what impressed me even more was that she was also utterly unabashed and competent, quick to locate the scissors with which to shred a towel for a bandage to stop the bleeding and quicker still to calm poor Michael … Then she sat on his lap and hugged him, and when he placed his bloody mitt on her naked white thigh it left a heart-shaped mark, an inadvertent posting of his territory.”

 

Eventually, Alex and Barbara—who is both the daughter of a US senator and the Granddaughter of a Supreme Court Judge—become lovers. In fact, she’s his girlfriend when he’s drafted for Vietnam. She’s again his girlfriend when he returns, although in the interim she’s become lovers with his Vietnam friend David.. The three of them move-in together in a ménage a trois—it is the sixties after all—before Alex fed-up with the situation seeks refuge in Paris. When we meet her again in the 2000s, she’s a US Congresswoman seeking reelection and married to David. As the filming takes place, a journalist gets wind of her past love-life and tries to use it against her campaign—it is the 2000s after all.

 

I earlier compared this novel to Middlemarch. I had in mind three points of comparison. First, the novel has a book at its center, although Alex’s book unlike Casaubon’s has been completed, published, and is now being filmed. Second, this is a multi-character, multi-perspectival novel that traces the impact of great political events on individual lives. Third--and most importantly—they are both novels of ideas. “You’ve put everything into [this book],” as Goldthwaite tells Alex. “The whole goddamn twentieth century and for all I know half the eighteenth and nineteenth, which you prefer anyway.”

 

Shooting Wars is fun, a great read, but it’s also fearsomely intelligent and erudite. You’ll learn inter alia which French philosopher only felt free so long as he had one foot in one country, one in another; why Ghiberti’s doors in Florence are best viewed at 5, and why we should prefer the “fish-faced” gawp of Edgar Manet’s Olympia to the luxuriant splendor of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. This is a book that makes you think.