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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't judge a book by its cover - or its title!, 11 Feb 2007
Exit A the title, and the linear drawing of what looks like a veiled woman on the cover, would never entice me to pick up this book. Even the synopsis gives the impression of being what I would call a 'man's book' about the military. However it is quite the opposite. A well written book about relationships, misunderstandings and feelings. Great insight into the different cultures of life in Japan, Vietnam and the US.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I didn't mind the cover or the title, 21 Jun 2007
I really enjoyed this book and found it fascinating. Clearly Swofford is still in the experimental stage as an author, but he has a massive talent for creation of characters and prose style. He grew up on a US airforce base in Japan, so the authenicity is there. Of the two main characters, I thought Virginia more believable than Severin, which is interesting in that one would expect an inexperienced author to have more difficulty with a character of the opposite sex. The early part of stage two of the book almost gets lost. I didn't find Severine's wife convincing and the Lisa character was just silly (but then it was set in California). However, as soon as Virginia reappears the story comes back to life and the ending was just perfect. I should have docked a star for the middle bit, but my 5 stars is a comment on the level of satisfaction overall. Read it and don't worry about the California bit; keep going.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Potential is Undermined by Too Many Implausibilities, 6 Sep 2007
Having mostly enjoyed Swofford's first book, the hugely successful Gulf War memoir Jarhead, I was curious to see what his fiction would be like. This somewhat uneven debut is written in much the same style prose, and does an equally good job taking the reader into a world they probably don't know firsthand. In Jarhead, Swofford himself was our guide to the first Gulf War, while here teenage Severin Boxx is our all-American guide to life on an American military base in Tokyo.
The first section is set on and around Yokata Air Base circa 1989, and is very effective at capturing the uneasy mix of American and Japanese culture. The base commandant's half-Japanese daughter Virginia is the living embodiment of this cross-cultural tension. Somewhat predictably, she's a loose cannon -- a crackling vortex of cliched teenage rebellion with a bizarre fascination with Faye Dunnaway's Bonnie from the 1972 film Bonnie and Clyde. As it happens, her father is also the high school football coach, and linebacker Severin's loyalties are torn between his coach and Virginia, whom he has a crush on. Swofford resolves this tension in a fairly over-the-top scene at a football game, which segues into a wholly ridiculous subplot involving a Japanese hood and kidnappings engineered by North Korean intelligence.
The curtain drops, and then raises some fifteen years later. Severin is now in his early 30s, living a very comfortable life in San Francisco with his moneyed professor of psychology wife. Although the plain-thinking teenager has grown up to earn a doctorate in French somethingorother, he's turned his back on academia and works as a groundskeeper at his wife's school. Although this section occasionally skips back over to Japan, where we learn what happened to Virginia, the bulk concerns Severin's clearly doomed marriage. As in the first part, this plays out in a rather unbelievable manner, and there's a distinctly artificial feeling, culminating in a bizarre "gotcha" scene.
The final third of the book is set in motion by a mysterious message Severin receives from his old coach. It seems he wants to hire Severin to track Virginia down and bring her to Vietnam (where he has retired) before he dies. This sends Severin to Vietnam and then Japan to confront all of themes the book has built up: facing one's past mistakes, reconciliation, first love, forgiveness, and so forth. Again, there is an element of implausibility to it all, and a rather convenient film festival plays a significant role.
Despite the various implausibilities and problems, the book is not without its charm. Swofford's prose is a pleasure to read, and in Severin, he skillfully captures a certain type of American male. The ending is surprisingly conventional and perhaps reveals Swofford's inner sentimental self. However, the central characters are all flawed and unlikable enough that the reader may not feel they deserve such a soft touch.
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