Exit A: A Novel

Anthony Swofford follows his international bestseller, Jarhead, with an unforgettable first novel — a powerful story about a youth spent on a U.S. air base in Japan and the gritty neon streets just outside it, where the Japanese underworld lurks and a rebellious young girl finds herself in great danger.

Anthony Swofford took the literary world by storm with Jarhead, his electrifying memoir of serving as a U.S. marine in the Gulf War. Celebrated for its visceral candor and profane lyricism, Jarhead stands today as a landmark contribution to the literature of war.

Now, in his bold fiction debut, Swofford demonstrates the same audacious vision as he plumbs the legacies of war, the wish for redemption, and the danger of love.

Seventeen-year-old Severin Boxx lives on Yokota, an enormous American air force base on the outskirts of Tokyo that is home to fourteen thousand U.S. soldiers and a large contingent of long-range nuclear bombers. Just outside the base lies the busy Haijima rail station. Exit A is one of the many doorways into this place of movement, anonymity, and sudden disappearance. Much of the novel's action transpires in the netherworld around Exit A, a mad neon landscape of noodle shops, strip clubs, sushi joints, pawnshops, whorehouses, sake fountains, military surplus stores, tattoo parlors, hash bars, comic book stores, pachinko parlors, fish shops, and alleys — the alleys that all lead somewhere, usually down.

It's here, not long before the Gulf War begins, that we first meet Severin, an earnest, muscular high-school-football star and son of a base colonel. Like most of the other young American men on the air base, Severin is mad for Virginia Kindwall, the base general's daughter, who is a hafu — half American and half Japanese. Beautiful, smart, and utterly defiant of a father who wields godlike military power, Virginia has become a petty criminal in the Japanese underground.

Severin is soon caught up in Virginia's world. But theirs is not a typical high school romance; they fall into trouble way over their heads and are quickly subjected to the enormous, unforgiving tensions between America and Japan — a relationship still informed by the long shadows of World War II and America's use of the atomic bomb.

Years later, Severin and Virginia remain lost to each other — until an emotionally frayed, thirtysomething Severin embarks on a quest to find Virginia and, in so doing, the part of himself taken from him when his boyhood abruptly ended.

Like Jarhead before it, Anthony Swofford's Exit A is darkly irreverent, frankly erotic, and more than a little wicked, a tale told in a brooding, pained voice filled with the simple human fury of being alive. It is, in sum, a first novel in full. Building inexorably toward a climax that is at once suspenseful and emotionally overwhelming, Anthony Swofford's fiction debut is a triumph.

"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." Publihsers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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 mlange 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.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"There's something so right about the fusion of absurdity with the American military novel. Blame it on 'Catch-22' or on Joseph Heller's literary predecessor, Jaroslav Hasek, whose classic 'The Good Soldier Svejk' set the bar for 20th-century military satire. So it's no surprise to find the characters in Anthony Swofford's new novel, 'Exit A,' mired in wanton self-absorption, stumbling from one mistake... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) to another, all while eyeing the North Korean communists sitting one bomber mission away with something of a wary indifference.

Except that 'Exit A' isn't a satire. It begins with that caustic tone but then morphs into a prosaic love story, upending all the lively, comedic action of the first, and best, part.

It's 1989, and the chilly Cold War breeze is still blowing over Yokota Air Base outside Tokyo. Severin Boxx, high school football star and son of an ambitious, chronically absent colonel, is desperately in love with Virginia Sachiko Kindwall, the commanding general's gorgeous, half-Japanese daughter. And she has plans for him. Busy rebelling from her authoritarian father and pursuing a life of petty crime, Bonnie-and-Clyde style, she wants to recruit Boxx into her motley Japanese gang. But Boxx is torn between his love for her and his respect for her father, Gen. (a.k.a. 'Coach') Kindwall, a three-tour Vietnam pilot who is ostensibly occupied with running a bomber wing but is really occupied with leading the base's football team to victory. On top of all this, a five-ton truck from the motor pool has just killed the teenage son of a prominent Japanese businessman, inciting local resentment against the U.S. occupation.

It's a promising start. Swofford sets American military culture against the urban Japanese underground, to engaging and original effect. Boxx and Virginia came into the world as lonely children, their births overshadowed by the Vietnam War. Now their lives are dominated by fathers wrapped up in the last thrashes of a dying world order. The displacement of the military brat within the nuclear family, and within society, is palpable:

'You could buy hot dogs on a stick after purchasing sneakers at the Athletic Shoe Factory, which was located next to a Baskin-Robbins counter, across the way from a Pizza Hut. Some of the kids had lived overseas for so long they didn't know that what lay in front of them was a replica trading center that could be found in thousands of American towns. They lived the suburban American dream without knowing it.'

But in Part 2, Swofford turns abruptly away from the rich material he has developed. Years have passed. Virginia is living in Japan with her young prison-born daughter. Boxx is living with his wealthy psychoanalyst wife in San Francisco, mowing the grounds of the college where she teaches. When a postcard arrives from 'Coach' Kindwall, now dying Kurtz-style in a hotel in Slum-town, Vietnam, Boxx is propelled on a journey toward his second monumental mistake. But his problems are new problems. Although his sense of social disconnection remains, it's an intellectual, sulk-in-your-gourmet-coffee kind of displacement, far removed from the gritty alleyways and subway terminals of Cold War Tokyo. That's okay, except that Swofford doesn't bring these two worlds together. Boxx moves between them, and his two lives, old and new, seem to compete with, rather than enlighten, each other. And when he finally visits Kindwall in Vietnam, it's unclear whether he's been driven by a haunting teenage love, by his ruined marriage or both.

In any case, Part 3 picks up where Part 1 left off. Boxx arrives in Vietnam to a frenzied feast of dog sausage and rice wine while outside, a parade of lantern boats flows along the river for the tourists. As in Part 2, Boxx is on a mission to return Kindwall's daughter to him. But why Kindwall is living (or, rather dying) in Vietnam, and not Tokyo, where his daughter lives, is never really addressed.

In place of character depth, we're left with narrative musings: 'Had (Kindwall's) memories of war been so intense, so constant, that he had no choice but to return to their source?' We also get a few oblique attempts to connect the Vietnam War to Iraq:

'He wondered if, in thirty years, young men and women would visit Anbar Province to tour battle sites where their parents had fought and died. . . . But, Saigon had fallen to the enemy, and it was just now slowly coming out of its diplomatic and commercial thaw. Iraq would have to turn out like Japan, with an accommodating populace, if anything modern — government, technology, or travel — were to take hold.'

Toward the end, the obstacles Swofford presents for Boxx seem drawn out merely for the purpose of delaying the inevitable ending. The fallout is a painfully one-dimensional love story, which is a shame because Swofford is capable of doing more, as he demonstrates both in the first half of his novel and in 'Jarhead,' his best-selling memoir about the 1991 Gulf War. In that book, he elegantly avoided a sentimental ending. In this book, unfortunately, he embraces it.

" Reviewed by Kim Ponders, whose novel "The Last Blue Mile" will be published in June will be published in June, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"A well-rounded tale, even if it ends on a sentimental note that will surprise readers of Swofford's tough-as-nails memoir." Kirkus Reviews

"The book starts off strongly....Ultimately, Swofford is much better at rendering unfamiliar worlds (military bases, criminal life) than familiar ones (college campuses, relationships)." Booklist

"Far from falling short of devotees' high expectations, Exit A ultimately proves that there is a lot to love about Swofford's first expedition into the realm of fiction." San Francisco Chronicle

"Swofford has a great eye for detail and cultural kitsch, which imbues Exit A with a lot of incidental humor despite its weightier themes." Los Angeles Times

"Part coming-of-age tale, part love story, part exploration of family life on a military base, the book is absorbing." Seattle Times

Swofford follows up his bestselling Jarhead with an unforgettable first novel — a compelling story about the legacy of a youth spent inside the stark confines of a U.S. Military base in Japan — and the profane, neon netherworld just outside it, where the Japanese underworld lurks.

Anthony Swofford, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Jarhead. He lives in New York City.