Exit A: A Novel - Hardcover

Swofford, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074327038X ISBN 13: 9780743270380

Publisher: Scribner, 2007

Synopsis

Harboring a secret love for a general's precocious daughter while coming of age at an Air Force base in 1989 Japan, young Severin Boxx is swept up in the motherless girl's subversive infatuation with the Japanese underground. A first novel by the author of Jarhead. 200,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York.

Reviews

Bestseller Swofford explores teenage love in his uneven first novel, which opens in 1989 at Yokata Air Base outside Tokyo (the title comes from the name of a nearby train stop). Severin Boxx, a 17-year-old military brat, plays football and pines for Virginia Sachiko Kindwall, the half-Japanese daughter of the American base commander, who's also his coach. Virginia's involvement in some not-so-petty crime (her heroine is Faye Dunaway of Bonnie and Clyde) leads her into serious trouble, which separates the young lovers seemingly forever. Swofford, as one might expect from the author of the acclaimed Jarhead (2003), his memoir of being a Marine sniper in the first Gulf War, clearly knows the U.S. military culture, though some readers may find his view of it overly harsh. He also does a good job of depicting the strange mélange where Japanese and American cultures coexist, but he's less convincing in his portrayal of Boxx's adult life (and doomed marriage) in San Francisco, while the ending is much too neat to be truly compelling. 7-city author tour. (Jan.)
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In Jarhead (2003), Swofford, a former marine, compellingly chronicled his experiences in the first Gulf War. In his first novel, he appears to draw on his upbringing as an air-force dependent. Seventeen-year-old Severin Boxx is a straight-arrow football player who lives on Yokota, the U.S. Air Force base just outside Tokyo. He is in love with Virginia Kindwall, who fantasizes that she is Bonnie Parker and robs convenience stores. Virginia's father, the base general, is Severin's football coach. When Virginia tries to recruit Severin for a life of crime, he refuses to join her, but the intensity of this brief encounter is enough to bind them together for life. The book starts off strongly, setting Severin's dilemma against the uneasy, and vividly depicted, symbiosis between base and city, and the heady emotions of youth seem perfect for this intersection of worlds. But when we meet Severin and Virginia as adults, the book loses its momentum, and when they meet again, the book loses its way. Is it about reconciling with authoritarian fathers? The possibility of recapturing first love? Our inability to escape the past? The difficulty of living in two worlds? Ultimately, Swofford is much better at rendering unfamiliar worlds (military bases, criminal life) than familiar ones (college campuses, relationships). Keir Graff
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Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 074327038X
• ISBN 13: 9780743270380
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304