The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud

“Johanna who?”

Many Canadians scratched their heads on receiving word that The Sentimentalists, by Johanna Skibsrud, had won their country’s prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2010. It wasn’t only because Canadians found her name difficult to pronounce—prior to The Sentimentalists, Skibsrud’s debut novel, she was a virtual unknown, with a single collection of poetry to her name.

Yet there it was. The tiny Nova Scotia press that had put out Skibsrud’s book of poetry had so few copies of the novel in circulation—800, to be exact—that most people could not get their hands on it. That issue was quickly resolved—the book has since become a bestseller in Canada—and now The Sentimentalists is being published in the US courtesy of W.W. Norton.

Emotionally satisfying as it may be to see an underdog win a major literary award, much of the hoopla surrounding this book seems unwarranted. It’s not that The Sentimentalists is a subpar novel—one could do a lot worse. But Skibsrud’s insight into the effects war has on one’s psyche is only occasionally original. And her agonizingly-slow-to-surface theme that feelings can alter or bury memory is not especially fresh or profound.

The unnamed narrator of The Sentimentalists intimates from the beginning that her father is a troubled man. But even after the reader learns that Napoleon Haskell served in Vietnam, it remains difficult to trace his problems and idiosyncrasies specifically to the conflict. Napoleon hardly fits the stereotype of a traumatized veteran. Excitable, voluble, and affectionate—especially toward his two daughters—he displays no overt signs of emotional distress. He likes Humphrey Bogart—especially in the classic film Casablanca—and quotes poetry. (The book’s title comes from an arch comment made by the narrator about the author of a poem quoted by her father. When Napoleon recites “Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I am dead,” the narrator jokes that these are “[t]he words of a rank sentimentalist.”) Gradually, though, the narrator reveals her father’s behavioral problems, including his abandonment of the family for several years, a lengthy period of alcoholism he eventually overcomes, and his inability to finish building a dream boat he wants to give his wife. The author drops hints that these issues bear some relation to experiences in Vietnam.

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Turns out to be true, as we learn when transported to Vietnam in 1967 by an omniscient third-person narrator. Until this moment, the tale includes precious little action or drama. Indeed, Skibsrud’s prolix prose, coupled with the narrator’s drawn-out, intense naval-gazing (much of her contemplation has nothing at all to do with her father), nearly sinks the story. The narration plods along like a trooper with a 60-pound backpack, and only the suspicion that Napoleon’s demons owe their birth to the long-ago war, and the hope that he will eventually open up, sustain reader interest. Even so, for the most part Napoleon refuses to talk about what happened. The narrator presses her father on the subject, to no avail. “Once my father said, women think that they can make sad things go away by knowing the reason that they happened. This was in dismissal of a question that I asked him once about his experiences in the war.”

We learn that whatever happened to Napoleon likely had something to do with the death of his friend Owen. The narrator puts it in a deliberately flat manner early on: “Owen had been a friend of my father’s and then he was killed in the war.” The Sentimentalists begins with the narrator and her sister moving their elderly and weakened father from his trailer home in Fargo, North Dakota, to his friend Henry Carey’s house in the (fictitious) town of Casablanca in Ontario. Henry? He’s Owen’s father.

Casablanca turns out to be the second incarnation of a town flooded in 1959 by the nearby lake. The original Casablanca lies forever submerged, a metaphor for the suppression of memory. The narrator, who lives in New York, leaves for Canada and moves in with her father and Henry after she catches her boyfriend cheating on her. Dying of cancer, and with a heightened sense of his mortality, Napoleon finally breaks his silence about the war. Even then, he doesn’t really tell his daughter much about Owen. He mostly talks about his brother Clark, who also served in Vietnam and who, unlike Owen, is still alive and well.

Fortunately for the reader, Skibsrud changes tack, suddenly introducing an omniscient narrator who describes Napoleon’s wartime experiences. We learn of Clark and his unit, but, more significantly, of Napoleon’s unit and its involvement in a reconnaissance operation gone awry in a Vietnamese village. (Here, Skibsrud’s story is based on a real-life incident at which her father Olaf, who died in 2008, was present.) During the operation, Owen may have been killed, and one or more of Napoleon’s comrades may have killed at least one Vietnamese civilian, possibly as revenge. Nothing is completely clear.

Even the transcript of Napoleon’s examination by a military investigative committee—itself based on the actual transcript of Skibsrud’s father’s testimony—fails to resolve the matter. Was Owen Carey killed in this operation? In his testimony, Napoleon says that a man named Adamsen died, and that Carey and another man were injured and evacuated. The narrator is left to wonder if Owen Carey died in the hospital and if one or more members of Napoleon’s unit exacted vengeance for their buddies.

Again, nothing is clear, partly because “the actions of war … [are] capable of establishing an event even at the moment of its occurrence as though it was already deeply in the past.” Indeed, for the narrator, the entire episode illustrates how memory can be manipulated—consciously and subconsciously—by people wishing to absolve themselves of responsibility, or, conversely, to shoulder it, regardless of the facts of the case. The power of this observation mitigates at least a little the disappointment the reader will feel at not being able to determine what happened.

Why did this interesting but lackluster novel win the Scotiabank Giller Prize? The Vietnam War continues to hold a fascination for many people. In 2007, the National Book Award for fiction went to Denis Johnson’s sprawling Vietnam War tale, Tree of Smoke. Clearly, in Canada too, Vietnam haunts the literary imagination. In 2005, the Scotiabank Giller went to another Vietnam novel, David Bergen’s The Time In Between, which deals with a former soldier’s grief over killing a Vietnamese civilian in the conflict. (Interestingly, even though thousands of Canadians fought alongside US troops as volunteers during the Vietnam War, both Skibsrud and Bergen’s protagonists are Americans who end up living in Canada.) These and other works of fiction probing the Vietnam experience and its long shadow help us better understand the disturbing realities and far-reaching implications of that conflict. Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel makes its modest contribution; The Sentimentalists is an intermittently engrossing tale that explores the unreliable nature of memory in general, and that of people scarred by conflict in particular.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Beirut, Lebanon.