I vote Gabe Hudson as the new model for the American man. I’m sure he would wince at the title, and I’m not generally one to promote a “national ideal” (although we must all admit to our dictatorial leanings), but he would be perfect to fill the shoes of archetypal masculine literary figures of the past. Like Melville, Hemmingway and Kerouac, he writes about identity, war and other existential challenges but with macho crutches, like irrationally laconic characters or misogyny justly removed. His writing lays bare the social constructions of masculinity and femininity that shape (and limit) our lives – a heavy task performed admittedly inadvertently and with delicious humor. He explains that when he began writing about the world as he sees it, “the props that are used to elicit certain responses from different genders seem very farcical.”
Dear Mr. President, his first collection of stories and a novella, subtly, patiently, respectfully, optimistically and humanely encourages humans to find other ways to deal with aggression and morality besides violence and war. But the real key pleasure of this collection is that it’s funny in that indescribably mind-pleasing way like McSweeney’s (to which Gabe Hudson often contributes), George Saunders and Donald Barthelme. Dear Mr. President is charmingly absurd and touching and oddly timely, since the stories are about the Persian Gulf War, an area of recently renewed, albeit dubious, interest.
Why did you choose to write about the Persian Gulf War?
It was supposed to be about a war that nobody remembered. The fact that we call it a war is really peculiar to me. The stark contrast between that and the war myths [our] generation inherited about Vietnam and WWII was intriguing. [The Gulf war] was the first war that you had an inordinate number of soldiers who never even fired their weapon, and they spent lots of time sitting around preening themselves to look good – because it was indicative of the younger generation to be media savvy. And the war was essentially censored – that was the first time they didn’t let journalists into the war theater except at predetermined points in time, so it would almost be a stage set when the journalists did come on. I think most of my friends had no sense of who anybody would be in the military, they just perceived them as robots or something. It seemed really important to me to make those people come alive as best I could. Some people in the military might be upset by the renditions that I did [like the Vietnam vet who uses the “threat” of his homosexuality to protest for peace]. I was watching something on television, and it was a bunch of guys crying and saluting the flag, and I thought: I don’t think that that’s the ideal demographic for the book …
You served as a rifleman in the Marines – why did you decide to enlist?
I have to admit I was reading a lot of [war fiction, like Cormac McCarthy] before I did the whole marine thing, and it was really funny because he makes these claims like “Until a person looks into the round and sees the darkness of his heart …” or something like that. I mean it sounds really ridiculous to repeat – and so I was curious about that. I wanted to know, is it really that way? Is it all just that dark? And I didn’t find that to be the case at all. In the marines, you’re basically doing it deadpan the whole time. You’re not allowed to show any emotion, your face is rigid, but inside you’re sort of laughing – a lot. It’s all a really funny experience – there’s a lot of humor involved if you have the right mindset, although it is a little bit sadistic. I found that I was still just as prone to daydreaming and goofing around with a piece of grass. So in a sense, I tried to refute [the glorification of military experience], but I didn’t want to do it in a way that was too obvious. It seemed really important to me to make arguments for all sides and ultimately to be empathetic to people who I otherwise might not be pre-disposed to be empathetic to.
Gabe Hudson is a human with a heart. We should all send copies of Dear Mr. President to our elected officials to lighten ‘em up a bit.
