In Country (For Further Study)

For Further Study

• David Booth, "Sam's Quest, Emmett's Wound: Grail Motifs in Bobbie Ann Mason's Portrait of America After Vietnam," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 98-109.

  Booth argues that elements of the Arthurian grail legend including the motif of the wasteland and the wounded king figure in In Country.

• Joel Osler Brende and Erwin Randolph Parson, Vietnam Veterans: The Road to Recovery, Plenum Press, 1985.

  Published at the same time as In Country, this book raises some of the same concerns as Mason's novel. It is because of books like these that veterans are not shunned today as much as they were in 1985.

• Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., "Finding One's History: Bobbie Ann Mason and Contemporary Southern Literature," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 20-33.

  Brinkmeyer explores the how Sam's pursuit of her own history and the history of the Vietnam War ultimately lead to her own personal growth.

• Joel Conarroe, "Winning Her Father's War," in The New York Times Book Review, September 15, 1985, p. 7.

  Conarroe reads In Country as a coming-of-age story in which Sam moves through traditional "rites of passage, progressing from separation to isolation and finally to integration.

• Wayne Gunn Drewey, "Initiation, Individuation, In Country" in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1, Autumn, 1996, pp. 59-73.

  Drewey argues that In Country uses as its structure the journey motif with a difference: in the case of Sam Hughes, the hero is a female.

• James R. Ebert, A Life In A Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 1965-1972, Presidio Press, 1993.

  Oddly, for all of the books written by and about veterans, there are few that try to capture the perspective of the "grunt" soldiers. This book does a thorough, intelligent job of mixing interviews with synopses in order to capture the experience as well as any book can.

• Arthur Egendorf, Healing From The War: Trauma and Transformation after Vietnam, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1985.

  Another book published the same year the same year as In Country, this book reads like a "self-help" or "pop psychology" book; the tone may be a little lighter than many academic studies, but that approach is necessary sometimes in order for ordinary people to understand the effects of the experience.

• W. D. Ehrhart, "Who's Responsible," in Vietnam Generation, Vol. 4, No. 1-2, Spring, 1992, pp. 95-100.

  Vietnam War poet Ehrhart discusses his contributions to In Country and offers a sympathetic and thorough analysis of the novel.

• Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times, September 4, 1985, p. C20.

  The reviewer credits Mason with a sure ear for teenaged dialogue and her clear sense of a "a young woman's craving for both knowledge and innocence."

• Jeffrey P. Kimball, To Reason Why: The Debate About the Causes of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War, Temple University Press, 1990.

  Not much is made in this novel about why America was involved in Vietnam at all, but this is certainly a factor that affected how servicemen were treated when they returned home, and what they thought of themselves as they grew up and began to understand the nature of politics.

• Katherine Kinney, " 'Humping the Boonies': Sex, Combat, and the Female in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country," in Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Philip K. Jason, University of Iowa Press, 1991, pp. 38-48.

  Kinney discusses how Sam attempts to transcend gender differences so that she can understand the meaning of the Vietnam War.

• Tom Myers, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam, Oxford University Press, 1988.

  This is not a collection of stories about the Vietnam experience, as the title suggests, but an academic examination of the narratives about the war. Chapters like "The Memoir as 'Wise Endurance" and "The Writer as Alchemist" look objectively at the Vietnam stories as a sub-genre of literature.

• Harriet Pollack, "From Shiloh to In Country to Feather Crowns, in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 95-117.

  Pollack examines the role of history in Mason's writing and particularly the role of southem women's history.

• Barbara T. Ryan, "Decentered Authority in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country," in Critique, Vol. 31, No. 3, Spring, 1990, pp. 199-212.

  Ryan examines Sam's use of available texts as a way of explaining her search for truth.

• Jeffrey Walsh, American War Literature 1914 to Vietnam, St. Martin's Press, 1982.

  This overview of literary themes that have touched war experiences and been touched by them in this century is a good reminder to readers that no piece of writing, no matter how well researched or how realistic, is ever objective.

• Kim Willenson, with the correspondents of Newsweek, The Bad War: An Oral History of Vietnam, New American Library, 1987.

  This book's shocking title, reflecting just the sort of hostility faced by Emmett and the other veterans in In Country, is actually a reference to a better-known book, Studs Turkel's 1985 The Good War, which is a collection of interviews with veterans of World War II.

• Jonathan Yardley, "Bobbie Ann Mason and the Shadow of Vietnam," in Book World — The Washington Post, September 8, 1985, p. 3.

  The reviewer faults Mason for using cliches and for failing to say anything new about the Vietnam War in her novel.