The Use of Tricks

You know, I think politics and magic were almost the same thing for him. Transformations—that’s part of it—trying to change things. When you think about it, magicians and politicians are basically control freaks.

This quote is from an interview with Tony Carbo and presented in Chapter 6, “Evidence,” which is one of the early “Evidence” chapters. Tony shares his thoughts about John after his and Kathy’s disappearances. Since Tony worked with John through five campaigns, he had a closer relationship with him and saw for himself how John operated and what was important to him. Tony believes that John views his life as a magician and as a politician in much the same way: Both roles enable him to create his own reality. John relied on his body movements and his voice to make the voters like him—the same trick he learned in his childhood magic shows. The quotation gives weight to the idea that John consistently manipulated situations to achieve his desired result. Tony’s analysis also broadens to explore John’s motivation, allowing him to present John as a man who wanted to control everything around him, which would include Kathy.

‘Sorcerer’s our man.’ And for John Wade, who had always considered himself a loner, the nickname was like a special badge, an emblem of belonging and brotherhood, something to take pride in. A nifty sound, too—Sorcerer—it had magic, it suggested certain powers, certain rare skills and aptitudes.

This passage comes from Chapter 7, “The Nature of Marriage,” and describes John’s introduction to his fellow soldiers in Charlie Company. John learned as a boy that performing magic tricks could make people like him, and in Vietnam, he has a chance to see if he still can pull off the illusion. The use of tricks works well among the men. Not only does John’s magic turn him into a well-liked friend, but it also reshapes this “barely competent” soldier into an integral part of the unit, someone the other men can believe in. In a sense, John’s transformation into Sorcerer serves as a trial run for his political career. In Vietnam, John comes to understand all the essential parts he can bring to the creation of his best persona.

He’d tried to pull off a trick that couldn't be done, which was to remake himself, to vanish what was past and replace it with things good and new. He should have known better. Should’ve lifted it out of the act. Never given the fucking show in the first place.

This passage occurs in Chapter 23, “Where They Looked,” the first day that John and Pat go out on the lake with Claude to search for Kathy. Pat has already made it clear that she thinks John is not doing enough to find her sister, and her implied criticism has caused John to think about how he appears through other people’s eyes. John knows he is a prime suspect in Kathy’s disappearance, but he feels he is partially to blame for that situation. He had been too confident in his ability to use his usual tricks to erase the past and recreate his reality. However, John’s own experience pretending he was able to bring his father back to life should have told him that his efforts are doomed. Some tricks were too transformative to pull off. John realizes he should have either figured out a way to deal with his actions at Thuan Yen—maybe even report what happened, as Thinbill suggested—or chosen a different path. If he hadn’t become a politician, his secret would have remained safe. Covering up his past is one of the rare cases where John’s tricks fail him.

The real war had ended. The trick now was to devise a future for himself.

 

This quotation appears in Chapter 26, “The Nature of the Dark,” after John leaves the battlefield for a military office job. The paragraph that follows, which describes how John doctored military documents to remove himself from Charlie Company and instead place himself with another platoon, shows the machinations behind the trick. John’s actions rely on the tricks he has performed throughout his life. As a boy, he used sleights of hand to pull off his tricks, but now he is using a typewriter and scissors. As a college student, John kept his secret self hidden from Kathy by spying. Now, he relies on the fact that the men in Charlie Company only knew him as Sorcerer, not John Wade. This trick was, up until that moment, the greatest one John had ever done, and the trick sustained the illusion for almost fifteen years. In the end, the only reason that the trick failed was that political operatives were determined to pull down the curtain on John’s past.

The Need to be Loved

John needed the conspicuous display of human love—absolute, unconditional love. Love without limit. Like a hunger, she thought. Some vast emptiness seemed to drive him on, a craving for warmth and reassurance. Politics was just a love thermometer. The polls quantified it, the elections made it official. Except nothing ever satisfied him. Certainly not public office. And not their marriage, either.

Here, in Chapter 9, “Hypothesis,” Kathy muses on John's feelings, needs, and thoughts about love. More than any other passage in the book, Kathy’s analysis explores John’s desperate need for love but does not explain it. The entirety of the book suggests that John perceives his father as withholding love, thus leading to his inner emptiness. Whatever the cause, John has fashioned his life around filling that void. He needs to feel love on a grand scale, he needs it to be public, and he needs it to be long-lasting. While his political path seems to meet his requirements, the life of an elected official also is precarious, subject to influences he can’t control. Since Kathy understands that public office and her love will never be enough for him, the reader understands that John’s efforts are hopeless and that he will always feel like he is not loved enough.

It was in the nature of love that John Wade went to the war. Not to hurt or be hurt, not to be a good citizen or a hero or a moral man. Only for love. Only to be loved. He imagined his father, who was dead, saying to him, ‘Well, you did it, you hung in there, and I’m so proud, just so incredibly proud.’

This passage appears in Chapter 10, which is titled “The Nature of Love” and explains one reason that John decided to enlist in the military and go to Vietnam. He believes that such an action would make his father proud of him and cause his father to finally love him the way he had always craved to be loved: unconditionally and wholeheartedly. Yet John’s sentiment is illogical. Not only is his father dead, thus unable to witness his son’s choice, John never expresses why going to war would make his father love him. The implication exists that just making a hard choice (“you hung in there”) would win his father’s love, but John provides no evidence to support his statement. Readers can’t help but agree with a suggestion made earlier by Kathy that John enlisted in the army to win favor with future voters. This could be true, and the statement “It was in the nature of love that John Wade went to the war” would still be true, just referring to the voters who sent John to office four times.

[P]oliticians in general are pretty insecure people. Look at me—fat as a pig. Love-starved. [Laughter] So we go public. We’re performers. We get up on stage and sing and dance and do our little show, anything to please folks, anything for applause. Like children. Just suck up the love.

Tony Carbo shares these thoughts about politicians and their motivations in Chapter 12, one of the chapters titled “Evidence.” According to Tony, John is far from an atypical politician in being drawn to the job for approval. Tony also notes that even people behind the scenes in politics, like himself, are in it for love, affection, and approval. Tony’s cynical take cheapens politicians and those who put them in power, in general, but his comment also shines a new light on how sincere their need for love truly is. If politicians are willing to do whatever it takes to make voters happy, are they really looking for love, or are they just looking for a way to feel better about themselves?

Violence and Death

Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn’t keep it in and he couldn’t let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start slashing and never stop.

This passage appears in Chapter 1, “How Unhappy They Were,” when John and Kathy are lying on the cottage porch, attempting to convince themselves that they still can create a happy future for themselves. Their talk centers on babies’ names and travel, but John can’t stop thinking about the wreckage of his life, both the lost election and the revelation of his participation in the war. John first began suppressing anger in childhood, when his father committed suicide. After the massacre in Vietnam, his persona, Sorcerer, was the only entity capable of holding down his rage. Yet, at the moment that he and Kathy are supposed to be trying to rebuild their lives with happy talk, John feels his rage boiling up again. This passage shows John’s inability to control himself, even around his wife whom he deeply loves.

She would’ve moved down the hallway to the living room and stopped there and watched him empty the teakettle on a geranium and a philodendron and a small young spider plant. ‘Kill Jesus,’ he was saying, which would’ve caused her to back away.

This passage appears at the beginning of Chapter 9, “Hypothesis,” when Kathy first wakes up because John is yelling bad things. She gets out of bed to see what’s going on and sees John killing houseplants with boiling water and uttering the words “Kill Jesus!” By this point in the novel, John has repeated this phrase numerous times. On one level, the phrase makes him feel omnipotent. On another level, he seems to use the words as a mantra attached to acts of violence. While John is merely killing houseplants, not people, his behavior alarms Kathy enough, likely combined with what she knows about John, that she immediately leaves the cottage. She can’t be certain that she is safe around John anymore, and she leaves for good.

The killing went on for four hours. It was thorough and systematic. In the morning sunlight, which shifted from pink to purple, people were shot dead and carved up with knives and raped and sodomized and bayoneted and blown into scraps. The bodies lay in piles.

These are the opening lines for Chapter 21, “The Nature of the Spirit,” and they illustrate the massacre at Thuan Yen. Words alone can hardly connote the sheer brutality that Charlie Company brought upon the village. There is no need for symbolic language because simple words carry enormous power on their own. The depiction of the bodies lying in piles makes clear the sheer number of the dead without having to give any specific figures. Many of the actions can only be accomplished up close, meaning that the perpetrators had to be right next to their victims while they inflicted so much pain and degradation upon them. The level of violence perpetrated against the people is hard to process. Juxtaposed against this horrifying scene are the delicate colors of the morning sun, pink and purple, shining down on a sea of red.