Taki's Mag

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I was raised Catholic, so no matter how my soul yearns to be free of piety, I have to break down and roll around in the stuff now and again. So let’s support the troops by giving some well-deserved attention to an Afghanistan veteran’s autobiographical novel. It cost me a whole three bucks to buy Samuel Finlay’s Breakfast With the Dirt Cult on Kindle, but mmm-hmmm, I feel like ten dollars’ worth of virtuous.

Most of the time the words “autobiographical novel” make me want to boil the writer’s keyboard in Frappuccino. But events during Finlay’s service fell into such a perfect narrative arc, he’d have been nuts to toss it out: On leave before deployment, the hero meets a bookish Canadian stripper who swears that if he comes home alive, she’ll have a legendary affair with him. He earns a sergeant’s rank, leads his men to battle, gets his hand shot to mincemeat, dreams of her in the hospital while giving birth to an unspeakable morphine constipation loaf, then tracks her down—and that’s where it gets gory.

For us civilians, the consumption of war fiction is having our cake and eating it too. Supporting the troops is a blame-free, aisle-crossing class outing that gets you extra credit with everyone. And when it comes to reading pleasure, a well-done war narrative like Finlay’s gives you all the camaraderie, the rough-and-tumble wit, the excitement, and the hardtack philosophy of being a warrior—without once having to climb a ridge in the lip-cracking desert sun, much less take a bullet. No wonder this is selling like hotcakes.

Wait … what? You haven’t heard of Breakfast With the Dirt Cult?

I hadn’t either, till Finlay sent me a query himself.

Finlay couldn’t even find a publisher.

“When I first started shopping around an early draft,” he tells me, “Band of Brothers had been on TV just a few years prior. There was even a war on and everything.” Unfortunately, Finlay’s narrative strikes an unmarketable medium: it’s too thoughtful for a shoot-’em-up, but he doesn’t “paint the military as a bunch of evil pseudo-Nazis” for the benefit of would-be intellectuals, either.

When he was in basic training and the officers pulled the fire alarms all night to mess with the recruits, he had indeed resolved to write a blazing bucket of spleen about how full of shit the Army was for all the world to read. But then 9/11 happened. And the guys he went to war with, including some of his superior officers, turned out to be such good people that he couldn’t write something so simplistic.

He could be fair and complex till he was blue in the face, however: agents and publishers were “all pretty much looking for the next Sex and the City,” says Finlay. “From what I gather, military-related stuff is sort of like the clap of the literary marketplace.”

He guesses he got about 500-800 rejections. He finally self-published in 2012, but without the support of a house, sales have been too depressing to even keep track of. He paid for some ads out of his pocket around last month’s July 4th celebration, but they “barely moved the needle.” He isn’t sure whether there’s really no market for current war fiction or whether publishers just think there’s none.

Now that you mention it, where are any of the big hit soldiers’ books and movies from this perma-war?

The Mideast deployment is now longer than the two World Wars of lore put together, yet not even the people’s medium of television is showing much from Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever we’re sending grunts this week. Band of Brothers covered World War II, the History Channel is stuck on Vietnam, and the publishing industry keeps churning out litfic and “clit lit.” As Adam Haslett writes in Prospect, “the most widely read and highly regarded books in the war have been written by journalists.”

If you’re writing from the soldier’s point of view, Finlay says, “unless it’s linked to a cartoon, video games, or some supernatural or intergalactic shit, you’re pretty much humped.” One agent told Finlay that “a lot of it had to do with the fact that the current wars were unpopular and that the news was always showing stuff about them and everybody was more or less sick of hearing about it.”

Just last week, Finlay got this from an agent:

I appreciate the opportunity to consider your work for possible representation, but having been sent countless memoirs/“novels” based on war experiences from WWI to Iraq without experiencing any success with them, I’m not the right agent for it …

There are a couple of good short story anthologies out—one titled, ironically, Fire and Forget—and every couple of months a major-media writer on a literary beat attempts due diligence for the trickle of novels that have seen traditional print. George Packer of the New Yorker dutifully put together an essay on the genre this year—but it’s prefaced by a 1233-word intro about, you guessed it, World War I and II and Vietnam fiction.

Finlay says: “Frankly, I’m not sure where [Packer] is getting his info. There really doesn’t seem to be the sort of interest he describes unless he’s trying to prime the pump. An ex-Marine named Chris Hernandez has a funny, angry sit-rep on his attempts at finding a home for his work which seems more like what I’ve seen.”

Finlay doesn’t lay all the blame on the public or the powers that be, however: “The unpopularity of the genre may partly be the fault of us writers,” he told me. “Ours is an eggheaded age, yet somehow also utterly vapid; we can get so focused on the tactical, technical aspect of the story that we lose the humanity of it all. … Homer doesn’t bore us with the intricacies of Bronze Age tactics and operating procedures.” And some poet-soldiers manage to come out of battle still too precious and writerly to stay off their own toes.

Granted, Finlay may also lose points with publishers and agents due to the flagrant non-PC nature of his writing. His soldiers indulge in vaudeville ethnic hijinks wherein nobody is sacred. He writes:

Walton watched his platoon laugh and tease each other with the openness reserved for siblings. He could not imagine such camaraderie and freedom of discourse among as disparate a group in the civilian world. The PC Thought Police would have denounced them on national TV for “hate speech” and then tossed them in the gulag until someone apologized and kissed the ring of whatever community had been offended. … Walton thought about his ETS date with bitter sweetness. He was going to miss these fuckers.

Nor does Finlay go easy on the whorish civilian girls who scam drinks out of off-duty personnel. He says that framing military stories from a left-wing perspective—as the works that got ink in the New Yorker seem to do—“may be the price you have to pay to get some daylight with the bougies—who I suspect still have a Baby Boomer center of gravity. Give ’em a whiff of gunpowder, but don’t push too far and have people think you’re an evil right-wing asshole.”

Granted, he could have used some help from a good editor—which is exactly what authors who do get picked up by major publishers benefit from before they go to press. This highlights a weakness of the self-publishing “revolution”: An editor is the literary equivalent of a makeup artist. Those who must go it alone go naked, snowballing their disadvantage. In Finlay’s case, a civilian editor could have warned him when the jargon and acronyms are getting confusing. He makes an effort to spell things out, but you still wish he’d re-up a reference once in a while.

The basic quality of the writing more than holds the book together, though. The sequence where he gets injured has at least five guaranteed laughs for anyone who’s ever been in medical shock, as the hero’s interior dialogue veers from staring mortality in the face, to wandering around a battlefield bleeding and inappropriately cracking wise, to getting his clothes cut off by a female medic: “HOLY SHIT! A FUCKING GIRL!”

And Finlay’s inability to care anymore what the hell you think makes for a great overall strategy. I’ve never read a book about an “important” subject that came off as so un-self-important. He knows he’s got a good story, so he doesn’t bother trying to make it the greatest tale ever told. He trusts in his own sense of humor, and the interest inherent in honesty and confusion. The funny stuff and the deep thoughts roll out of that naturally.

For the entire interview with Finlay, read here.