Footnotes with Brian Van Reet
Editor's note: This interview is the second installment in a new series of author interviews. In "Footnotes," we introduce authors through four questions about their writing habits, work routines, motivations and some of their favorite reading materials.
Brian Van Reet left behind his undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia to enlist in the U.S. Army as a tank crewman shortly after 9/11. Later, he earned the Bronze Star for valor after a yearlong deployment to Iraq. Today, Van Reet is the author of “Spoils” (Lee Boudreaux Books, 2017), a novel of the Iraq War that tracks the lived experiences and moral dilemmas of three individuals on both sides of that conflict. Author Anne Enright called it “a book about war for people who don’t like books about war.” RealClearBooks corresponded with Van Reet about this debut novel, his writing life and more.
Q: What led you to start writing your novel and how challenging was it to complete?
I thought I might be a writer long before I ever thought I would become a soldier. It’s been a part of my identity for as long as I can remember, and after I came home from Iraq, it was only natural for me to write about that experience. I was compelled to. Most books are difficult to finish, and my experience with "Spoils" was no different. It took about five years from beginning the project to final edits. Along the way I had to throw away a couple drafts that I thought at the time were completed books. It was disheartening, but now I’m glad it worked out that way.
Q: You must spend long periods of time alone or in a quiet place, contemplating and working through your stories. What do you do as soon as you finish writing for the day?
This isn’t a glamorous answer, but as soon as I am done writing I switch into dad mode. So, change a diaper?
Q: Tell us about your favorite book.
It’s hard for me to pick favorites. There are too many great books to choose from, and what I love today, I may love a little less tomorrow. But a few that I’d mention are "Lolita," "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley." Nabokov and Hemingway got their due in their own lifetimes, but Patricia Highsmith deserves pride of place among the greatest 20th century writers. She wasn’t so much an innovative prose stylist as a psychological and formal innovator, a master of foreboding mood, shifting identity and intricate yet natural plotting. I tend to like books that are smartly written and zip along with high stakes.
Q: If you could design the reading curriculum for all American high school students, which book or books would you assign?
Before selling "Spoils," I worked for a while as a freelance educational writer. While I didn’t have a hand in setting the reading curriculum, I am somewhat familiar with what students are encountering in terms of history texts, especially. Most are shamefully whitewashed and middle of the road. They have to be to sell to school boards in places like Texas, where I live. The lack of interestingness in history textbooks is a real shame, not to mention dangerous: to my mind, history is the most important discipline in the humanities for the way it should inform our nation’s political life. Emphasis on the word should. With that in mind, my first pick for a reading list would be a book like "The People’s History of the United States." Not that it’s gospel, but I remember one of my high school teachers giving us a chapter of it to read, and it was a revelation to me at that age, that there were these counter-interpretations of history, and some were controversial, worth arguing over, written from other perspectives—not nearly so hagiographic and dull as the textbook version.
