Exit A
Anthony Swofford Scribner, 287pp, £12.99
ISBN 0743295641
One of the best things about Anthony Swofford's celebrated memoir Jarhead was its depiction of what it was like to take part in a war that often did not really feel like a war. His first novel is a sort of companion piece, showing what it is like to grow up in a peacetime that is not at all peaceful.
Exit A opens in 1989, as the Berlin Wall is tumbling and America and the Soviet Union are finally able to break their long, nightmarish embrace. At the sprawling Yokota air base outside Tokyo, 17-year-old Severin Boxx is trying to lead the life of a normal American teenager. He plays football for the high-school team, hangs out with his goofy team-mates at the base commissary and misses his absent fighter-pilot father. Mostly, however, he longs for Virginia Kindwall, the hafu, or half-Japanese, daughter of his formidable coach (who is also the base commander). What Severin does not know is that Virginia, who is obsessed with the film Bonnie and Clyde, has secretly joined a local Japanese robbery gang.
What starts as mere delinquency soon evolves into a series of outright felonies. When the gang leader sees that the powerfully built Severin is infatuated with his hafu moll, he makes Virginia convince him to quit the football team and join the gang. Severin obliges his beloved in supremely dramatic fashion, stripping down to his jockstrap in the middle of the big game. "For the first time since third grade he thought he might be above the brawl, above the messy punch and counterpunch, above the fray. Love had done this to him." With some American muscle on board, the gang attempts a daring kidnapping that goes spectacularly wrong, leading to dire results for the two teenagers.
Having skilfully rendered the anomie of these young expats, Swofford leaps forward 15 years to map the consequences of their youthful folly. Virginia lives anonymously in Japan with her daughter, estranged from her overbearing father, who has moved to Vietnam after leaving his post in disgrace. Severin has earned a PhD and is married to a redoubtable San Francisco psychology professor, though he seems trapped in a teenage limbo, mowing lawns for a living and philandering with students barely older than Virginia was when everything fell apart.
When a dying General Kindwall asks Severin to help him find his daughter, his former star player has no choice but to follow orders. "The vague and cloudy concept of redemption was the only value he could attach to the endeavor." And so he sets out in search of his old love in Japan, a country that is both infinitely strange to him and oddly like home.
Exit A (the title refers to the way out of the subway station near the air base) is at its best when Swofford describes the surreal netherworld created by the grafting of American military culture on to a strange and largely hostile land. At the Yokota base, "you could buy hot dogs on a stick after purchasing sneakers at the Athletic Shoe Factory, which was located next to a Baskin-Robbins counter, across the way from a Pizza Hut. Some of the kids had lived overseas for so long they didn't know that what lay in front of them was a replica trading center that could be found in thousands of American towns. They lived the suburban American dream without knowing it." In the book's most surreal scene, an ageing Faye Dunaway makes a guest appearance at a screening of Bonnie and Clyde in a Tokyo mall cinema, where she is mobbed by Japanese girls in 1930s-style clothing and blonde wigs.
Swofford fares less well with the human element of his novel. Although his protagonists' rebellion against ersatz America is perfectly understandable, their relationship never truly catches fire. No matter how hard Severin and Virginia try to come together, they remain very much like America and Japan - deeply implicated, but never really working as a couple.
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