Ms. Hen reviews In Country

In Country

Bobbie Ann Mason

Harper and Row

1985

Ms. Hen has read few books that she has loved so much that she had a difficult time reviewing them. This is one. She didn’t know anything about it before she read it. She picked it up at the Little Free Library in Downtown Crossing in Boston, in front of Walgreens, which does not usually have high quality books. She took this because she remembered the name of the author, since someone Ms. Hen knew mentioned her name once and it stuck in her head.

What Ms. Hen loved about this novel is that it seemed real to her. The novel takes place in the summer of 1984, and Ms. Hen remembers that year. She was several years younger than the protagonist, Sam, but the book is visceral to her. Sam just graduated from high school, and is trying to decide what she wants from life. She lives in a small town in Kentucky with her uncle who is an unemployed Vietnam vet. Her mother moved to Lexington to be with her new husband and their baby. Sam’s father died in Vietnam before she was born.

Sam is fascinated and somewhat obsessed with the Vietnam War and the father she never knew. She thinks her uncle might be suffering from Agent Orange, a poison that the American government used in Vietnam. She hangs around with the vets at McDonald’s and becomes infatuated with one of her uncle’s friends, Tom, and buys a Volkswagen bug from him. She is confused. She doesn’t want to move in with her mother in Lexington, because she doesn’t want to be around the baby and her mother’s husband, but she doesn’t want to stay in her town forever.

When Ms. Hen read this, she sympathized with Sam, because Sam doesn’t know what she wants, and is unsure of her prospects. This book reminded Ms. Hen a little of the movie GHOST WORLD, because it is about a young woman trying to find herself right after she graduates from high school. It also reminded Ms. Hen of what it was like to be young in the Eighties, and to be around older people talking about the Sixties, and how much better life was then. These days, a lot of Eighties nostalgia exists, and Ms. Hen thinks it’s peculiar how memories always seem to take a turn, and the people in charge of TV and movies always want to go back to when they were young, to the time they thought was better. That might be because society could seem to be disintegrating with the passing years, and each decade brings more problems and controversy. Ms. Hen wonders if in the future there will be nostalgia for the confusing times we are living in now.

Ms. Hen understands that when the Vietnam War was happening, it was on the news every night. These days, the war this country is having is not. Ms. Hen thinks people might not be angry enough about the war that is happening now, and it doesn’t seem real to people until a vet goes on a shooting spree and murders, similar to last week. That occurred while Ms. Hen was reading IN COUNTRY, so she had war on her mind. War screws everything up, and will continue to do so, until we decide to stop it. But nobody knows when that will happen.

A smattering of chickens lives in the pages of this book, but Ms. Hen will not recount them all. They made her happy, but the book itself moved Ms. Hen more than anything else she has read recently. It’s not often that she cries at the end of a book, but she did reading this one. She shed tears because sometimes life doesn’t make any sense, and there’s nothing we can do about it, we just have to keep going on.