cleverpun’s 2019 Reading Journal: March · 11:58pm Apr 1st, 2019
A common piece of writing advice is that to become a better writer, one should read a lot. There is truth to this, of course, depending on what one reads. Welcome back to my reading journal.
Fobbit by David Abrams
I chose this book to read because my library’s automated recommendations compared it with Catch-22; a book which I count among my all-time favorites. The comparison is apt in some ways, but not in others.
A “fobbit” is a portmanteau of “hobbit” and “Forward Operating Base”—the military is nothing if not fond of jargon, slang, and abbreviations. A fobbit is someone who has been deployed to a combat zone, but clings to the relative safety of the FOB, busying themselves with deskwork and papers, rather than rifles and patrols.
This book switches between perspectives, with the ‘main’ character being one Chance Gooding, a Staff Sergeant whose job it is to write up press releases about the various terrorist attacks and brutal deaths, while putting a deflective, neutral, positive spin on them.
There are other POV characters, of various ranks and story import, but they all have a thread in common. Everything in the book filters back through the Public Affairs Office. Watching Gooding interact with his overly-cautious and cowardly editor/commanding officer is when the themes of the book are most overt. War is Hell, and War is also tedious and stressful.
This is where the commonalities to Catch-22 are most clear. Both are about war being unpleasant, tedious, dangerous, brutal. Both approach this subject with a combination of black comedy, dry wit, and actual drama and tragedy. Both take a very slice-of-life approach to the proceedings, flopping between lots of perspectives and scenarios, but with only a limited amount of actual combat situations.
Unlike Catch-22, however, the characters goals and motivations are less clear. While Catch-22 was all about a soldier desperate to leave the war and go home, Fobbit is about, well, fobbits. Soldiers who are waiting to go home, who already have a finish line to head toward. Or, in the case of some characters, who desperately want to avoid becoming fobbits.
As a civilian, I was able to empathize with the fobbits of the book more than the soldiers, and I think that is part of the point. This is a slice-of-life book about the military. The themes of deflection, perception, and danger are constant in the way the press and news is portrayed, but it’s also just simply about soldiers being human. The author based this book on his experiences in Iraq, and it shows.
I’ve spent a lot of this meandering journal talking about how the book compares to Catch-22. But I think the comparison doesn’t do it justice. They use similar tools and have a similar subject, but they are ultimately very different stories. I’d still recommend Fobbit, but I think those initial comparisons set my expectations incorrectly.
Next up: Dune by Frank Herbert
Word of advice with Dune: The movie makes more sense if you've already read the book, and the book makes more sense if you've already seen the movie.
Kind of appropriate that Catch-22 came up in this review.
Dune is a really interesting book. I don't like it as much as I used to because of reasons that I'll get into when I read the review, but it still remains a really good and striking story with an evocative setting.