With Exiles, his first collection of shorter fiction, the author of the universally acclaimed, best-selling memoir A Rumor of War ("It will make the strongest among us weep", wrote John Gregory Dunne) sends the reader on a tripartite adventure.
First to suburban Connecticut, where a young blue-collar man on the way to his mother's funeral falls in with an upper-crust couple who lavish attention on him and pull him into unexpected dilemmas.
Then to Australia's Torres Strait, where a charismatic but troublesome stranger washes ashore into the thick of a struggle for a tiny island's very identity.
Then to Vietnam--vintage Caputo territory--where a squad of misfits plunge deep into the jungle in search of the body of their mess sergeant, who has been carried off by a tiger.
No matter the backdrop, Philip Caputo's ear for the vernacular is unerring, while his interrogation of human nature--of the deceptions we inflict on ourselves and others--is unflinching. Exiles affirms the remarkable range, the freedom from genre, of a writer whose "meditations on the love and hate of war were hailed by William Styron as "among the most eloquent I have read in modern literature.
Writer Philip Caputo masters here the difficult but powerful novella form--one that combines the economy and exactness of the short story with the momentum and weight of the novel--to create the three superb narratives that make up Exiles. The stories (titled "Standing In," "Paradise," and "In The Forest of the Laughing Elephant," and telling the stories of a barber in Connecticut, a shipwreck survivor on a wild Australian coast, and a squad of American soldiers in the Vietnamese jungle, respectively) are unrelated on the surface--but all three travel in a weird emotional terrain of alienation reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor.
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From Publishers Weekly
Despite an absorbing premise, multiple adventures at sea and ashore, and a succession of colorful characters, this account by Pulitzer Prize-winner Caputo (Rumors of War) of a nautical voyage from Maine to the tropics, and from innocence to disillusionment, lingers in the doldrums before acquiring the tragic velocity of its denouement. In 1901, in an apparently quixotic character-building exercise, "grim and intransigent" Boston Brahmin Cyrus Braithwaite banishes his three adolescent sons (16-year-old daredevil Nathaniel, sharp-tongued Eliot, 15, and rational but timid Andrew, 12) to sea for the summer in the family schooner, the Double EagleAwith food supplies, $30 and orders not to show their faces until September. When an old salt advises them, "Keep yer hawsers free fer runnin', yer eyes on the weathah, an' remember that any idjit kin crack it on but the wise man knaowsta shorten sail on time," however, it's obvious that their plan to try to emulate their father's early career as a wrecker will bring them all the disaster the sea can deliver. Storms, fog, sharks and alligators, encounters with unscrupulous people from every social strata and other misadventures all build toward the inevitable, presaged hurricane, two tragic deaths and the wreck of the Double Eagle. Once the long-awaited hurricane finally hits, off the coast of Cuba, Caputo generates real excitement and suspense as the romantic salvage venture concocted by the three boys and their Yale sidekick and crew member becomes a life-or-death test of character. But the chapters on the trip from Maine to the Florida Keys are thickly coated with local and historical color, including dialect-heavy oystermen and sponge-harvesters. The gothic subplot of Cyrus's motives and the Braithwaite family's secrets, played out against the Civil War's aftermath and the Spanish-American War, adds ballast on a vessel already laden with a heavy cargo of Original Sin, inherited character flaws, parents who destroy their children and the decline of America's "barons of mercantile aristocracy," whose guilty secrets haunt them down the generations. The concatenation of all these elements may daunt some readers; others will appreciate Captuo's meticulous research and his Conradian vision of America's past. 40,000 first printing; BOMC alternate. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
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Novelist and journalist Philip Caputo (1941 -- ) was born in Chicago and educated at Purdue and Loyola Universities. After graduating in 1964, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps for three years, including a 16-month tour of duty in Vietnam. He has written 14 books, including two memoirs, four books of general nonfiction, and eight novels. His acclaimed memoir of Vietnam, A Rumor of War, has been published in 15 languages, has sold over 1.5 million copies since its publication in 1977, and is widely regarded as a classic in the literature of war. His 2005 novel "Acts of Faith," a story about war, love, and the betrayal of ideals set in war-torn Sudan is considered his masterpiece in fiction, and has sold 102,000 copies to date, His most recent novel, Crossers, set against a backdrop of drug and illegal-immigrant smuggling on the Mexican border,was published in hardcover in 2009 by Alfred A. Knopf and in paperback by Vintage in 2010. He is now working on a travel book, "The Longest Road: From the Southern Cross to the Northern Lights." It describes an epic road trip from the southernmost point in the U.S., Key West, Floirida, to the northernmost that can be reached by road, Deadhorse Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean. The journey took 4 months and covered 17,000 miles. Though it bears his unique stamp, the narrative fuses elements of John Steinbeck, Jack Keruoac, William Least Moon, and Charles Kuralt. Caputo interviewed more than 80 Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are like in the 21st century. He expects to finish in June of the year. Henry Holt will publish the book in May, 2013.
In addition to books, Caputo has published dozens of major magazine articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces in publications ranging from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post to Esquire, National Geographic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Topics included profiles of novelist William Styron and actor Robert Redford, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the turmoil on the Mexican border.
Caputo's professional writing career began in 1968, when he joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune, serving as a general assignment and team investigative reporter until 1972. For the next five years, he was a foreign correspondent for that newspaper, stationed in Rome, Beirut, Saigon, and Moscow. In 1977, he left the paper to devote himself to writing books and magazine articles.
Caputo has won 10 journalistic and literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 (shared for team investigative reporting on vote fraud in Chicago), the Overseas Press Club Award in 1973, the Sidney Hillman Foundation award in 1977 (for A Rumor of War), the Connecticut Book Award in 2006, and the Literary Lights Award in 2007. His first novel, Horn of Africa, was a National Book Award finalist in 1980, and his 2007 essay on illegal immigration won the Blackford Prize for nonfiction from the University of Virginia.
He and his wife, Leslie Ware, an editor for Consumer Reports magazine, divide their time between Connecticut and Arizona. Caputo has two sons from a previous marriage, Geoffrey, a jazz composer and music teacher, and Marc, a political reporter for the Miami Herald.
This is a spectacular book. The opening novella is the weakest of the bunch, but is more than made up for by the other two. "Paradise," the second, is a perfectly told slice of mounting tension that lies somewhere between Robert Stone and Alex Garlard (closer to the former). Caputo nails the dialect and sense of place, amazingly so (having visited that part of the world, I'm particularly impressed). The final novella is a masterpiece, one of the best things written about the war in Vietnam, a dark vision that reads like a rollercoaster ride.
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I read this book about two years ago while sailing in and around Vancouver Island. The book made me forget that I was on such an adventure. "Standing In", the first of three novellas contained within, absorbed me and effected me so deeply that I can remember the exact feelings I felt at the various places on the boat. Buy the book for that story alone. Amazing. The others are good too, but do not compare with the first.
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Caputo does not hesitate to write from anyone's point of view, or about any place, and his is a fullness of vision that seems in very short order in today's literary scene. These stories call upon an intimite knowledge of the kinds of human frailty and types of strength and ways we endure, and Caputo's portrayal of human beings pinned between the choices that harvest life or invite death will haunt even the most jaded reader. "In the Forest of the Laughing Elephant," especially, brings to mind both APOCALYPSE NOW and THE THINGS THEY CARRIED without seeming derivative of either of them, and can stand alongside any work about the madness of war, not just Vietnam. This is a book to read and be affected by--a reminder of why we ever decided to read in the first place.
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