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Now!
Tony Christini wondered why there were
no antiwar novels published in the US about its war in Iraq.
So did his cohorts Mike Palecek and Andre Vltchek
After all, doesn't this war
and its implications need a fictional approach to reach readers
who avoid non-fiction? Don't other cultures and peoples utilize
the fictive approach to make political points. Indeed, haven't
writers throughout history understood the power that fiction
provides for a view too often unheard. I guess one could argue
that there is such a thing as political fiction in the United
States if they included novels about Washington corruption and
chicanery, but there is little fiction that considers the politics
of US extraparliamentary movements. Given this dirth of literature,
Christini, Palecek and Vltchek started a publishing venture
to resolve the situation. The company, known as Mainstay Press,
has around a half dozen titles currently on their list, most
of them fiction. It also includes a website that features discussions
about literature and politics.
Homefrontis
the first novel in a trilogy that takes on the Iraq War and the
complicity of the common citizen. Set somewhere in the United
States, the story is told through the words and thoughts of one
family and some members of their circle. A year after losing
their son during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the novel presents
the family's questions and doubts. Simultaneously, it carries
on a conversation with the reader about the reasons for the young
man's death.
Oftentimes, novels like Homefront
are so political that they read more like a tract from some political
sect than like a novel. In other words, the politics render
the flow of the story and its characters to be woodenlike props.
The story become secondary at best to the politics. While there
is no doubt that this book is very political, just like there
is no doubt as to the author's politics, Christini manages to
make this work quite readable. The story has its own compelling
style that sweeps the reader into the minds and hearts of its
characters.
The son's death proves to be
a cathartic event in the life of the family and the individuals
that make it up. The mother can't get away from the doubts she
has regarding her first statement to the press where she stated
"Aaron (her son) died for all of us." It seems that
within minutes of her utterance, she begins to wonder whether
she should have said "Aaron died because of all of
us." It is this question that the novel revolves around
and it is this question that the author wants each of us to answer
for ourselves.
Like Upton Sinclair's King
Coal or even John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Homefront
is part moral and political outrage and part story. Taken from
today's headlines, there are themes in this book that read like
the evening news. However, the format of fiction allows the
writer (and the reader) to go beyond the soundbite. Thereby
that ordinary US family becomes an intellectually and emotionally
complex creature. Mom not only questions the complicity of her
politician cousin, she also questions her own. The dead man's
brother wonders how much the world of sports and macho masculinity
created he soldier his brother became. His sisters move from
their very private worlds to the public sphere where nothing
is certain but their own convictions. It is the author's hope
that the reader will do the same.
Is the US public this complex?
Or are they like so many docile creatures that think only how
they are told? Are their concerns really only as deep as the
next episode of their favorite television show or the next ball
game? Christini thinks not. Otherwise, why bother writing the
novel? Most folks involved in the antiwar movement agree with
Christini. Otherwise why bother spending the energy it takes
to go to meetings and marches? Most politicians, on the other
hand, seem to hold the opposite viewpoint. Otherwise, why would
they continue to support and fund a war that poll after poll
tells them their constituents don't support? If they don't consider
us to be the simple creatures described above, than the only
other possibility is that they hold us in even greater contempt
than previously thought. Or perhaps it's just that the money
from the plutocrats that really run this country is just so plentiful
that any public or private conscience that the politicians have
is rendered dumb in its presence. The presence of amoral (if
not immoral) power and greed, and their effect on those whom
we choose to rule us is the subject of the second book in the
trilogy, Washburn.
Homefront is an overtly political and staunchly
antiwar novel. This in itself is a rarity in today's world of
publishing. Besides the novels of Washington corruption and
chicanery mentioned above, Tom Clancy and a myriad of others
publish works that justify and encourage the warmongers and their
backers, all the while implying to the reading public that the
world the imperialists made is the only real world and one that
not only deserves to be, but is as permanent as the mountains
of the Himalayas. Not since Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
has there been a novel for the US market that so clearly addressed
war from an oppositional viewpoint. Homefront is a noble
attempt to change that fictional reality.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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