New West Book Review

War Hits Home in Phil Condon’s “Nine Ten Again”

By Jenny Shank, 9-24-09

Nine Ten Again
by Phil Condon
Elixir Press, 186 pages, $17

Looking out the window each day at peaceful American streets, it’s difficult for many of us to tell that our country is at war.  But the characters in Missoula writer Phil Condon’s sharply-written new story collection, Nine Ten Again, are all too aware of the far-away wars that the U.S. has participated in over the past few decades, which have affected them in ways both tangible and intangible.  Yellow ribbons appear throughout the book not as symbols of hope but as symptoms of malignancy, signs of the wars that rob people of their lives, mental health, self-respect, and peace of mind.

Most of Condon’s characters work blue-collar jobs, and so they are not as insulated from war as are those with more money.  They are veterans too scarred by their service to hold down a job, or people desperate enough for money to contemplate signing up for a hitch as contractors in the Middle East.  As a character in the title story says, “She ain’t ever gonna be 9-10 again, boys.”

Condon, who teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana, frequently evokes his characters’ connection to or disconnection from the landscape. His stories are set all over the interior of country, including Montana, Colorado, Nebraska, Illinois, and Kansas.

In the title story, Clint Mulane is a down-on-his-luck truck driver.  He can’t find a decent job where he wants to live, out in the countryside, and his wife and child have left him to move into town.  He’s tempted when a local know-it-all named Rex who has worked on offshore rigs claims that a company will be coming through to hire people to work in Qatar.  “My contact says they’re due to need oil men, carpenters, drivers, you name it.  You get room, board, and expenses.  Plus a fat nest egg when you finish up.” But as with most of Condon’s protagonists, things don’t go the way Clint plans.

“The White Beast,” on the other hand, features a man enjoying a good life who is nearly undone by the appearance of an opossum in his house.  Roy has safely returned from a drive in a rainstorm and parked his Porsche in the garage.  His kids and wife are away visiting her parents in New York City, and he sits down to have some wine and contemplate his life.  “Oak furniture, rock fireplace, redwood deck through the window, and then the common woods stretching down and away from the backyard.  Hell, he was fine.  He was doing all right for himself.  Better than all right.”

Roy steps out of the shower and discovers an opossum in his hallway.  The animal opens “its jaws” and hisses.  Roy tries to reassert his control of the situation, but when the power goes out, he’s reduced to hysterics.  The opossum seems to represent the fear of the unknown malign occurrence that could snatch Roy’s settled happiness from him at any moment, a mysterious representative from nature who comes to remind Roy of how little is really in his control.  In many of the other stories in Nine Ten Again, the dreaded thing occurs, but in “The White Beast” Roy is left safe, fearing what might happen.

On the other end of the economic spectrum, a bricklayer named Duck Brinweiser in the story “Cakewalk” witnesses a murder and he must participate in its cover-up to preserve his desperately needed job.  “Duck and Mona had two kids, Donnie and Sue, seven and ten,” Condon writes, “and every bill that came with them.” In “A Silver Cloud,” a single mother named Penny also has to endure degradation in silence because she can’t afford to lose her job. 

In the background of these stories of day-to-day desperation, history progresses, filtering in through news reports and idle office chitchat.  One of Penny’s coworkers holds up a newspaper whose headline announces the fall of Baghdad.  “Only three weeks,” he crows, “It’s a great day for the U.S. of A.”

While the conflicts overseas lend an atmosphere of vague unease to many of the stories, for the protagonist of “A Country Voice,” war takes center stage every day.  A damaged Vietnam Veteran, Chad spends his time working in the garage or doing landscaping for his neighbors while his anger and mental illness builds to a boiling point.  “The VA people can’t hear me,” he thinks, “they’re clones from the central office.  They’ve been body-snatched and mind-washed, with buttons for balls.  I can tell by the way they sit.  Charlie at the desk, answering the phone, filling out the forms.  That’s why I get the treatment I get.  They like to start wars, but not to finish them.  I’m a finisher, a lifer on duty at the homefront, and it makes their skin crawl.  They call me a syndrome and mail me monthly checks.”

The stories in Nine Ten Again are geographically diverse, and the characters they feature are distinct from one another, but taken together they present a striking portrait of the different ways contemporary Americans relate to the faraway wars their country wages, and how the country’s angst mirrors their personal anxieties, anger, and troubles.

Phil Condon will read from his new book at Fact & Fiction in Missoula on Friday, September 25 (7 p.m.).

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