O’Brien published The Things They Carried in 1990, returning to the immediate setting of Vietnam during the war, which is present in his other novels. O’Brien’s return to the rich raw materials of his own experience proved fruitful, as The Things They Carried won the 1990 Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction. The novel was selected by The New York Times as one of the year’s ten best novels and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1991, O’Brien was awarded the Melcher Award for The Things They Carried and won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in 1992.
The follow-up novel, In the Lake of the Woods, published in 1994, again takes up the major themes seen in O’Brien’s work: guilt, complicity, culpability, and moral courage. O’Brien invents protagonist John Wade, a Vietnam veteran who aspires to win a senatorial election. He loses by a landslide, however, as charges about his complicity in the My Lai massacre come to light during his campaign. To recover from the defeat, John and his wife Kathy stay at a cabin on the shores of a Minnesota lake. O’Brien couches the novel in the style of magical realism and adds an element of mystery as Kathy disappears, and blame for her disappearance (and possible death) fall on her husband. John is forced to confront the deep denial he harbors about his participation in the war as O’Brien raises larger questions about the fallout of war and the consequences of wars after the fighting has ceased and the participants return home changed. In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as the best novel of 1994 by Time magazine.
In his most recent novel, Tomcat in Love, O’Brien creates a Vietnam veteran protagonist, Tom Chippering, though the subject of O’Brien’s novel is not war, but love. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Tomcat in Love is a comic novel about a sexist, politically incorrect hero, one that readers love to hate. O’Brien explains that [his] “real fans will love the book. There are so-called fans who are basically Vietnam junkies, but the people who appreciate the writing will like this. I think this is my best book.”
O’Brien has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation. Adept at sly comic fiction about mundane or serious topics, O’Brien is a master of creative storytelling, a manipulator of literary form, and one of the most challenging authors of his time in terms of how he intermixes form and content.
