Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

April 23, 2012
In his return to memoir, Jarhead author Swofford explores his troubled relationship with his father and the long hangover that followed publishing a bestseller. After serving in the Marines during the Gulf War, Swofford attended the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. Every writer dreams of what happened next: Jarhead was made into a Hollywood film. However, celebrity only encouraged Swofford to indulge his passions for heavy drinking, good cocaine, and random sexual encounters. Meanwhile, he faced his father’s declining health and the shadow cast by his older brother’s death from cancer. Swofford opens with a swaggering declaration of his partying and sexual prowess, a tone that transforms even thoughts of suicide into chest pounding. Other sections, like his response to a vicious letter from his father, read more like therapy than literature: Swofford just hasn’t found his way to address the subject. A different, and far better, writer appears when Swofford leaves the Oedipal battlefield for a trip to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, and in the vivid reconstruction of his paternal grandparents’ romance in the Deep South before WWII. It’s the journalism rather than the memoir that makes this book worth reading. Agent: Sloan Harris.

June 1, 2012
Fiery follow-up memoir by the bestselling author of Jarhead (2003). In his first memoir, Swofford (Exit A, 2007, etc.) chronicled his brutal stint as a sniper in the First Gulf War. A smash success, the book was made into an eponymous Hollywood movie. Reveling in his newfound fame, Swofford relished his easy access to money, casual sex and drugs. Here, he chronicles how his overindulgence in all three resulted in the loss of his fortune. The stream of women feels endless; he cheated and lied about being in love, using sex to quell boredom and his deep, sometimes deadly, loneliness and intermittent hopelessness. Details of intimate entanglements with women, booze and a rainbow of prescription pills make for sometimes painful reading, as one relationship after another crashes and burns, and the hypersexual Swofford displays little to no emotional growth or empathy. Simultaneously, he revisits his volatile, even hateful, relationship with his father, a veteran who verbally and occasionally physically abused his three children. Swofford's father is now divorced and suffering from emphysema, but this pitiable state doesn't blunt the author's rage about his father's past failings. These include a laundry list of misdeeds, such as the time Swofford overlooked dog droppings that he'd been charged with picking up and his father dragged him across the yard and held his face inches away from the feces. Flooded with anger toward his father, Swofford is choked by grief when recalling vivid memories of his older brother, Jeff, who died of cancer as an adult. Swofford's writing, like many of his stories, is explosive. The author's voice and energy are compelling, but his hot, volcanic anger saturates the narrative, and the sheer self-indulgence and lack of filter make the book oscillate from wildly engaging to off-putting. Nonetheless, it's sure to be a bestseller.

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January 1, 2012

A New York Times best seller with currently 250,000 copies available, Jarhead recounted Swofford's service as a marine sniper in the Gulf War. Here he illuminates his postwar experience as he tamped down painful memories with alcohol, drugs, fast cars, and bad sex, then pulled himself together by taking a series of road trips with his terminally ill father. Jarhead was a hit, postwar memoirs are gaining momen-tum, and there's a ten-city tour.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2012
Swofford's best-selling, made-into-a-movie war memoir, Jarhead (2003), apparently earned him a lot of money, because this sequel is partly about blowing a fortune on booze, drugs, and women. It's also about his fraught interactions with his father, whom Swofford indicts for cheating on his mother, missing his brother's funeral, and being an abusive parent. The father has complaints about Swofford, too, and in the course of episodic illustrations of wasting his Jarhead windfall, Swofford recounts three cross-country road trips during which father and son vented their resentments. Dramatized with quotation-mark accuracy, their conversations, as they veer around inflammatory subjects, reveal certain mutual affinities serving as the basis for reconciliation. Some, as for sexual conquest, generate vulgarity that could alienate some readers. Other readers, however, may regard Swofford as unsparingly honest about himself, his loveless assignations, and his emotional descent toward, according to Swofford, thoughts of committing suicide and murdering his father. With his naked reflections harboring a redemptive conclusion, Swofford will engage those interested in father-son relationships.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)